The Hour of the Innocents

by Robert Paston

  We had music. Some practice sessions went better than others, but on the good nights, we startled ourselves. Each of us knew that this was something different.

  One evening in the dog days of August, we fell into a jam that wouldn’t stop. I couldn’t play at Matty’s level, but he never complained. He just let me take my solos in turn. And I played with a power I could never summon before. The music was alive, a wonderful roar, colossally greater than flesh, strings, and speakers.

  It was past time to quit when we killed the jam. We still had to load our gear into the van so the warehouse could get back to business in the morning. But Frankie said, “Yo, hey. Let’s do ‘Angeline’ one more time.”

  Stosh put down his milk bottle of Tang and started the beat before the rest of us were ready. The song had been aggressive as I’d written it, but as we worked out our individual parts it became an attack of merciless guitar riffs. The bass line pounded and Stosh thumped his drums as if he had murder in mind.

  I kicked off the main guitar motif. Frankie entered with a plummeting bass line that hit bottom, then drove forward. Matty screamed in above us, completing a manic, metal world. Stosh machine-gunned with his sticks.

  Cocking his head at the mike, Frankie sang:

  Oh, Angeline … someday I will break out of this waking dream …

  Angeline … science is the mother of the man machine …

  Angeline … I love to watch your wires glow in ecstasy …

  Oh, Angeline … mechanical perfection lying next to me …

  Stosh came in on high harmony for the chorus:

  But how much do you really feel?

  Tell me if our love is real …

  How much does the program mean?

  Sweet Angeline …

  Matty tormented his guitar, slashing the damned with razors, as we crossed an instrumental bridge. We tightened back into another verse and chorus, then it was my turn to solo. I’d worked out a sequence of riffs that climbed the frets until I was bending my B and high E strings halfway across the neck. Frankie swooped down on the microphone for the last verse. His voice was agonized and exactly right:

  Angeline … they say the pain of love is just a memory …

  Open up your vision screens and look at me, just look at me …

  Angeline … maybe this is all a programmed memory …

  Maybe I don’t really feel this agony, that’s killing me …

  Instead of driving into a closing chorus, the music stopped as if struck off by an ax. With Matty quietly backing the vocal line on guitar, Frankie sang, almost whispering:

  In the sequence of the body … I can feel the hand of God.

  And that was it. We were drained. I wondered if we would ever play that song as perfectly again.

  Frankie laughed. “I can’t believe I’m singing a song about screwing a robot. Instead of ‘Angeline,’ I might as well just sing ‘Angela.’”

  FOUR

  The evening was a disaster. Had Angela been a dog, her ears would have gone straight back when I walked into the practice session with Laura. She went through the motions of greeting someone new, all peace, love, and smiles, but her hostility filled the room like a stink. Angela’s hackles had never gone up at any other girl I’d brought around.

  And Laura and I had walked into an argument.

  “What’s this all about, Frankie?” Stosh demanded. “For real?”

  “For fuck’s sake. It’s eight hundred bucks for four nights. That’s a lot of bread, man. Plus free rooms.”

  “The Rocktop’s a rip-off. Half the time, Mario doesn’t pay up and the union won’t do shit. It’s the worst dive in the Poconos. You said that yourself, the last time.”

  “Mario never stiffed us. Look, it’s four solid nights of work.”

  “What’s wrong with the gig?” I asked.

  Stosh turned to me. With his Tartar eyes, bandito mustache, and black hair brushing his shoulders, he looked like a Polish pirate.

  “What’s wrong is that I got us in as the opening act at the Farm Show Arena in Harrisburg that night. It’s a big show.”

  “For union scale,” Frankie said dismissively.

  “But it could be a break,” Stosh said. “Paul Revere and the Raiders are supposed to headline. We could blow them away.”

  The polarity in the band had reversed. Stosh was normally the one who put money first, with Frankie concerned about building our reputation.

  “The arena’s the better gig, Frankie,” I said.

  “You stay out of it,” he told me. “Just write your songs.”

  Matty spoke up: “We all get a say. Him, too.”

  I thought Frankie was going to lash out at Matty, but he restrained himself. “Okay, what do you think? Four nights and two hundred apiece? Or charity work for one night?”

  “Stosh is right,” Matty said. “It’s an opportunity.”

  I just didn’t get the situation. Frankie knew better.

  “I guess I screwed up, then,” Frankie said. “’Cause I already signed the contract with Mario.”

  “You shouldn’t of done that.” Stosh walked away. “That is really the shits, Frankie.”

  “Argue later,” Matty said. “We need to rehearse.”

  We tried to make things whole again through the music. But we didn’t click. With our first paid jobs just over a week away, we didn’t sound awful, but we didn’t sound like the Innocents. It was not the introduction to the band that I had envisioned for Laura, either.

  Impressed by Deep Purple’s cover of “Hush,” we’d hunted through older hits for songs we could supercharge ourselves. Matty arranged a medley of early Beatles tunes, recasting them as big-amp white soul. We began with “I Feel Fine,” which Stosh howled in his coalcracker-goes-to-Memphis voice, then Frankie took over the lead vocal on “I’ve Just Seen a Face” as we layered harmonies over roughneck guitars.

  The vital organs were all there, but the body refused to come to life.

  After sitting politely on the sofa with Angela for a half hour, Laura offered me a smile and went outside with her book. Tenacious in our anger at one another, everyone with a musical instrument attacked Matty’s arrangement. The medley rebuffed us.

  Lighting another cigarette, Angela followed Laura outside. I hoped she wasn’t going to start anything. I didn’t want Frankie to pick up on what had gone down between Angela and me.

  “Let’s try something else,” Stosh said, “and come back to this later.”

  “How about a break?” I asked.

  Frankie immediately took off his bass. Stosh stuck his drumsticks into their metal quiver. Only Matty continued to work on his part.

  The warehouse held the heat of the late-summer days, but the evenings had begun to darken and cool. I found Laura and Angela sitting on the loading dock, five feet apart, both of them reading in the dying light. Laura had Les Liaisons dangereuses in her hands. Angela was reading From the Terrace. Or pretending to. There was no hint of a conversation between them.

  Frankie came up behind me and took in the scene.

  “Now you got everybody reading,” he told me.

  “Not you, though,” Angela said.

  “I don’t want to ruin my eyes.” Pivoting toward me and lighting a cigarette, he said, “She’s had her nose in that thing all week. Somebody at the salon gave it to her.” He knelt beside Laura. “Excuse me, but we haven’t been introduced right. I’m Frankie. The band doesn’t always fight like that.”

  I felt the impulse to hit him. The irrationality of the evening was contagious.

  “So, what are you reading?” Frankie asked her.

  Laura closed the book and handed it to him. “It’s about a hustler,” she told him.

  Frankie flipped through a few pages. The text was in French.

  “You read this stuff? You and Bark are going to be perfect for each other.”

  Angela’s profile would have cut steel.

  We needed to get back to work. Frankie tossed his cigarette ont
o the gravel and told Laura, “Watch out for this guy. He’s a real lady-killer.”

  “It’s kind of you to warn me,” Laura said.

  Angela seethed. I would not have been too surprised to emerge at the end of our practice session and find her standing over Laura’s corpse. I had been so exhilarated by the sudden advent of Laura in my life that I acted blindly. Bringing her to the rehearsal out of the blue had been a stupid move. I had hoped to impress her and had not given Angela a thought.

  The second round of the rehearsal went better. With Stosh a nailed-down dynamo behind his drum kit and Matty standing still while his fingers raced, Frankie and I were developing our center-stage theatrics, playing off each other for an invisible crowd. As the darkness thickened, both women came back in, but neither seemed the least interested in the music. Laura tried to read through the noise. Angela smoked one cigarette after another. The Beatles medley came to life at last, then we worked on Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild,” which perfectly fit the image we sought to project. When we turned to “Angeline,” the performance was crisp, if not as thrilling as during our last session.

  By the time we started packing up our gear, everybody had accepted Frankie’s maneuver regarding the Rocktop gig in November, although his motivation remained baffling. And there was other business to discuss.

  “Joey Schaeffer wants to do our sound,” Stosh said.

  “What’s Joey know about doing sound?” Frankie asked. “Joey’s a stoner.”

  “He’s never as stoned as the people around him,” I told them. Joey played at being a head, but he calculated the benefits and risks. He didn’t make offers impulsively. “What’s the deal, Stosh?”

  “Joey’ll buy his own PA system. Altec Lansing speakers, the works. We don’t have to pay him a cent until the band gets going right. Frankie, you’re always complaining we need more volume on the vocals.”

  “What’s he want after that, a full cut?” Frankie asked. The role reversal of the earlier evening was playing out again. There were pieces to the puzzle that I didn’t have.

  “He knows better,” Stosh said. “Joey just wants something to do, to hang out with us. He wants be in a band any way he can. And a monkey can learn to work a sound board.”

  “A monkey with a good ear,” I said. “Joey has a good ear for music.” When he wasn’t in his party master guise, Joey and I listened to music he never played at his tribal gatherings, from Charlie Parker to Tim Buckley.

  Joey also struck me as a canary in a coal mine: When he left somebody else’s party suddenly, you knew it was time to go. Unlike his brother, Joey was a survivor.

  “He want a contract or anything?” Frankie asked.

  “He just wants to impress chicks. To strut his stuff.”

  “Joey really believes in the band,” I said. “He told me. After the last rehearsal he came to. I think he just wants to touch the music any way he can.”

  Matty snapped the buckles shut on his guitar case and said, “If Joey Schaeffer does our sound, he doesn’t sell dope at our gigs and he doesn’t carry, either. He stays straight, until we’re done playing. No second chances.”

  Frankie said, “Joey’ll never go for that.”

  “Yes,” I said. “He will.”

  Frankie looked at me. “Yeah, I forgot. You and Joey are fish from the same pond.”

  Joey and I didn’t really share a background, except that we both grew up south of the mountain, where the coalcracker accent collided with Pennsylvania Dutch. He and his brother, who was doing federal time, came from a well-off Orwigsburg family, the honest-to-God trust fund set. The parents had burned to death in a car accident. Leaving the Wedgwood Restaurant’s bar, they had pulled into the path of a tractor-trailer cresting the hill. Joey had promptly dropped out of college to enjoy his good fortune.

  He could afford a sound system, even without his dope business. Dealing was just his way of being cool. Calling himself a “sound engineer” for an up-and-coming group would be a step up in coolness, the way Joey saw things.

  “Just think it over,” Stosh said. “We can let Joey know next week. We don’t play no big halls till the end of the month, except for the Bloomsburg thing.”

  Laura showed more interest in our discussion than she had in the music. I felt as if we were being studied by an anthropologist.

  Breaking down a mike stand, Frankie said, “How about those Jew kids in Chicago? They’re getting more than they bargained for, ain’t?”

  Stosh snickered. “They think Chicago cops are tough, they ought to try Shenandoah after a football game.”

  “They’re trying to change the country for the better,” I said. “They’re trying to end the war.” I sounded insincere, and I was. With a bum knee from playing Midget League football, I was in no danger from the draft and could not have cared less about the protesters at the Democratic convention. But I felt I had to speak up in front of Laura.

  “They don’t care about the war,” Matty said quietly. “They don’t know anything about the war.”

  “Then what, exactly, is all that shit about?” Frankie asked.

  “It’s about them,” Matty said.

  * * *

  Out in the parking lot, Matty followed me to my car. As I came back around from putting Laura inside, he said, “I wanted to ask you something.”

  I was impatient to be alone with Laura. To see if she thought she’d made the greatest mistake of her life that afternoon.

  “I have to drive down to Philly on Saturday,” Matty told me. “To visit a friend. I thought maybe you’d like to come along for the ride?”

  “Can’t. I’m giving guitar lessons until two.”

  He seemed genuinely disappointed. Then he said, “If I went down on Sunday, instead, would you want to ride along?”

  “Sure. If Sunday works for you.” It was our last free weekend before we started playing gigs again, and having known her for less than ten hours, I already hoped that I could spend it with Laura. Had anybody but Matty invited me, I would have turned them down. I was drawn to him in a way I could not explain.

  “I’ll come by your place,” he said. “Nine too early?”

  “No, man. Nine’s great.”

  He walked off toward his car.

  As soon as I got behind the wheel, I pulled Laura to me and kissed her. Her response was not what it had been a few hours before.

  “Have you slept with that woman? Angela?”

  “No. Almost. But no.”

  We drove. As we entered Pottsville, Laura canceled the silence.

  “She’s a vampire.”

  * * *

  I met her in the Pottsville Library. Impossible to miss, she looked right through me. Her dark hair was pinned up against the heat and she held a sculptural stillness as she stared at an illustration in a book. She looked demure and effortlessly beautiful, instantly haunting, exquisite. I had never seen anything like her in the flesh, and I felt an unprecedented dread that she’d walk out the door and fade into the sunlight.

  The late-summer air hung dense in the narrow hall, resisting the fans. I pulled the books I wanted as quickly as I could and took a chair just down the table, facing her. Given that every other reading table was free, my move was hardly subtle.

  Her skin had just enough color to show that she didn’t avoid the sun. Up close, her hair was a very dark brown, not black. Dampness shone on her neck.

  I made an act of paging through a music text, pausing at opaque charts.

  She was studying an art book of some kind. I could see colored forms, but nothing identifiable from where I sat. She refused to look up.

  “Art history major?” I whispered when I could wait no longer.

  “I don’t have a major yet,” she said. For the first time, I glimpsed her eyes. Ice blue, they made an unsettling contrast to her hair.

  “What school?”

  “Penn State.”

  “I meant the art. The book.”

  “The Pre-Raphaelites.”

&
nbsp; “Aubrey Beardsley,” I said. His was the only name that leapt to mind. “Fey porn for rich gents.”

  The sculpture came alive. Her back straightened. Her blue eyes shot me.

  “Beardsley wasn’t a Pre-Raphaelite,” she said. “Although there were obvious stylistic influences in play. He was certainly homosexual, though. Is that why you’re familiar with his work?”

  Before I could gather a reply, she turned her book toward me, raising it to share the illustration that so intrigued her. She had been studying the portrait of a woman whose face turned back over her shoulder. The model had angular features, pouting lips, clothes-rack shoulders, and a cascade of auburn hair. She was a dead ringer for Frankie.

  “Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted her. He was in love with her.”

  I grasped a lifeline. “She wrote poetry, right?”

  “That was his sister.”

  “It’s not really my period.”

  “What is your period?”

  “I go for manlier artists. Rembrandt … Caravaggio…”

  She laughed so loud that the librarian froze in place.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Caravaggio was the most notorious homosexual in Rome. I guess they didn’t put that in your book of pickup lines.”

  “I’m not really good on the Renaissance.”

  “Caravaggio was early Baroque. Mannerist, actually.”

  She thrust a small hand toward my books but couldn’t quite reach them. I held up the music text so she could read the cover.

  “Counterpoint? You must like Bach.”

  “Sure. I love Bach.”

  “What’s your favorite cantata?”

  This wasn’t going the way it was supposed to go. I wasn’t going to get away with answering “A Whiter Shade of Pale.”

  “Every one of Bach’s cantatas has something special,” I told her. “It depends on your mood.” I found her more alarmingly beautiful with each new humiliation.