by Lewis Shiner
The Other Side and The Chevelles overlapped on two thirds of their song lists, though The Other Side did the white arrangements of songs like “Sloopy” and “Shake” and Ron preferred to keep it that way. “Give ’em what they know and love,” he said.
They ran through “Good Lovin’” and “Land of 1000 Dances” and “Gloria,” and then Ron said, “I don’t know about y’all, but this sounds good to me. If we worked hard for a couple–three weeks, I think we’d be ready to get out and make some money.”
Alex, expecting grief from Cole, said, “We should probably talk it over, maybe sleep on it.”
To his surprise, Cole jerked his head to summon him into the corner. “I’m up for it if you are,” he said.
Ron discreetly played ice-skating music to cover their voices and Nolan, in the way of all drummers, couldn’t keep from playing along.
“Are you sure?” Alex said.
“Sure, why not? These guys are pros, that Hammond sounds boss, even if it is a bitch to move.”
“Well, shit. Okay, then.”
The four of them sat at the dining room table and hashed out the particulars. Sunny was in the kitchen and weird bean and curry powder smells wafted out of the pass-through.
“I can build a ramp,” Cole said, “to help get that B-3 in and out. Maybe put a pulley inside the door.”
Ron nodded. “Great idea.”
“What about originals?” Alex said. “We’ve got a few from before.”
Ron made a face. “We can do one or two if it’s important to you. Basically we should give ’em—”
“—what they know and love,” Cole finished for him.
“Hey,” Ron said. “It worked for us.”
“After they’ve heard our songs a couple of times,” Alex said, “they’ll know and love them.”
“It’s all right,” Cole said, surprising Alex again. “Let it go.”
“What about uniforms?” Ron asked.
“No uniforms,” Cole said. “That’s history. We should dress sharp, but not alike.”
Nolan spoke up for the first time. “He’s right. Uniforms are so ‘Meet The Beatles.’”
“All right,” Ron said. “Now somebody needs to handle bookings. I did it in Houston, and I know the game. I would want ten percent off the top if I’m going to do the extra work.”
“I’m willing to try it,” Cole said. “If it doesn’t work out, we can switch to a pro.”
“Fair enough. And the name? Are you guys all right with The Other Side?”
Cole laughed. Something sarcastic in it turned Alex off. “Sure,” Cole said. “Why not?”
After Ron and Nolan left, Alex tried to get Cole to open up. Cole denied that he was acting weirdly. “We sound good together. We can get up and running in no time. Why shop around? Maybe it’s like you said. Maybe it’s destiny.”
“I guess,” Alex said. He was straddling Cole’s desk chair while Cole lay in bed, playing “Laura Lee” on his unplugged Strat.
“Let’s talk about something else,” Cole said. “Let’s talk about that strawberry blonde in Russian class. Miss Brooks.” The instructor took roll by last name only.
“I don’t know what the big deal is. I think she’s stuck on herself. Her little friend is cute, though. Laughing all the time? Girls that laugh like that can be had.”
“Perfect,” Cole said. “You go after her friend on a second front. Your victory will open the way for me, like the Schlieffen Plan.” He made a scissors with the index and middle fingers of his left hand.
“The Scheisskopf Plan. Look, it’s Saturday night. You couldn’t find your blonde girlfriend if you had to. We need some action, here.” He ran down every option you could think of—a freshman mixer at the Union, Blues Boy Hubbard on the East Side, the dollar theater, even offered to take him dancing at the Broken Spoke, a country joint in South Austin that Susan had mentioned. Cole was uninterested.
Alex stood up. “Suit yourself, man. I’m going to get something to eat and see what I can promote at the mixer.”
“Careful what you bring home. We could end up with your one-night stands camped out in the yard, throwing themselves at you every time you go in and out.”
“Cole, what the hell is eating you?”
“Nothing, man, it was just a joke. Are you otr tonight or something?”
“Ah, fuck you, Cole. I’ll see you later.”
“Good luck!” Cole said as Alex closed the door on him.
If anybody was on the rag, it was Cole—moody, secretive, tossing out those little backhanded cutdowns. Alex had never been with a woman who could piss him off as much as Cole.
He stopped by Tupelo’s room, and Tupelo was up for the mixer. They grabbed a pizza on the Drag and then headed up to the Ballroom on the second floor of the Union. They showed their freshman ids at the door and entered a huge, wood-floored hall. The outside wall had French doors down its entire length that opened onto a balcony. Massive chandeliers hung from the arched ceiling and overlit the room. A couple of tables against the long inside wall held a vat of pink punch and bowls of Fritos and dip.
At the far end was a band in matching jackets, missing the point of Wilson Pickett’s “Funky Broadway.” The drummer twirled his sticks like twin propellers, the organist kept raking one hand across the keys and throwing it in the air, the singer crouched and lunged all over the front of the stage, the guitarist hopped up and down, and the bass player, for contrast, stood motionless and stared over the heads of the crowd. All of their faces were stretched into fake smiles.
Is this what I got us into? Alex wondered. It was like a minstrel show without the blackface, a performance so artificial and stylized that it reminded Alex of the animatronics robots at Disneyland. He had a feeling that the old Houston Other Side had looked quite a lot like this, and that the new, improved Other Side might turn into more of the same.
The other thousand or so people in the room also looked like they had escaped from a previous decade. Most of the girls were in dresses that had been starched into suits of armor, the boys in slacks and button-down shirts and flat-top haircuts. When they danced, nothing moved below the waist. Though the boys outnumbered the girls two to one, Alex saw girls dancing alone or with each other.
“What’s wrong?” Tupelo said.
“I don’t know, man, this is not looking like my scene.”
“You want to split?”
“Kind of.”
“Don’t worry about me. I’ll catch a shuttle, or I can walk back.”
“You sure?”
“Absolutely.”
Alex toured the perimeter while the band went into a version of “My Girl” that involved a lot of shouting at the audience. Tupelo was on the dance floor with a short girl whose mouse-brown hair had been combed and sprayed into a perfect sphere. They slow-danced with virtually no points of contact.
On his way to the exit, Alex caught a familiar head-tossing gesture. Sunny had two girls with him, both knockouts, a blonde in bangs and a brunette in a ponytail. Both wore low heels, skirts above the knee, and form-fitting tops.
Sunny beckoned him over. “This is Alex, the capitalist tool who overcharges me for rent,” he said without a smile. “This is Rhonda and Natalie.”
Sunny had not indicated which was which. Alex shook hands with the blonde and said, “Rhonda?”
She didn’t correct him, and the brunette waved. Sunny picked up where he’d evidently left off in a lecture about Islam. He seemed to have both girls hypnotized. When he came up for air, Alex said, “Where are you guys from?”
“Waxahachie,” said the blonde. Waxahachie was the first city far enough south of Dallas on I-35 that it had not yet been absorbed. It had likewise failed to absorb any of Dallas’s sophistication or pretentions.
“We came down together,” the brunette said. “How long have you known Sunny?”
“I only got my capitalist tentacles around him on Thursday.”
Neither of them cracked a smile. “
Well,” said the blonde, “that’s two days longer than us.”
Then Sunny was off again, starting with the medical career he had mapped out for himself, veering into the health benefits of vegetarianism, and ending up with an argument that vegetarian-tolerant Sufism was superior to the rest of meat-eating Islam. It was the last thing Alex would have dreamed of as a come-on, but, miraculously, it appeared to be working.
He made one last effort to cut one of the women out for himself. “What are you girls doing at ut? Shouldn’t you be in Hollywood becoming movie stars?” Cole always got away with lines like that, yet it fell flat for Alex.
“We’re here,” the blonde said, “to make acquaintances that will be important to us all our lives.”
The brunette’s etiquette kicked in as if by reflex. “What are you studying?”
Say accounting, he told himself. Tell her you’ll be taking over your daddy’s multi-million-dollar company. “English, probably,” he said. “I’m a musician.”
Alex watched the last shreds of interest fade from both their eyes.
“Well, nice meeting you,” he said. “I hope we continue to be important to each other.” He put a hand on Sunny’s back. “See you at the Castle.”
As he walked away, he heard the blonde ask Sunny, breathlessly, “You live in a castle?”
The Varsity Theater, across the street, was showing The Trip, with Peter Fonda, so he wasted an hour and a half watching Hollywood anti-drug propaganda. He did get a few laughs out of the “trip” scene, as did a few others in the audience who obviously knew more about lsd than the writers did. Mostly the Mike Bloomfield soundtrack made him remember seeing Bloomfield on acid at the Fillmore, half a continent and a lifetime away. He felt old and sad.
He got home after eleven. The front of the house was dark except for faint purple light leaking past the blinds in Sunny’s room. As he walked in, he saw that Sunny’s door was ajar and heard a muted string quartet. Another faint light came from the kitchen, where the brunette stood in front of the open refrigerator door. She had nothing on but her knit top. A dark thicket of pubic hair was visible below the bottom of the shirt and the cold had stiffened her nipples. She smelled of incense and marijuana. Her eyes were bloodshot and dull.
“Natalie?” Alex asked.
“I’m Rhonda,” she said. “Natalie’s in the bedroom.”
“Both of you?” Alex said. He failed to keep the amazement out of his voice.
Rhonda giggled. “Isn’t it decadent? Oh, are those donuts?”
They were Tupelo’s. “Those aren’t for—”
He was too late. She’d already taken a bite out of one and speared a second with a long, red-tipped finger. She finished the first and licked her fingers, then her full lips. “The other’s for later,” she said, closing the fridge. “’Scuse me.” She squeezed past him and walked unsteadily to Sunny’s room and closed the door.
It’s like I’m the hired help, Alex thought. It wasn’t like he’d connected with her, emotionally or intellectually. It shouldn’t have mattered. Yet it did. He went upstairs, rolled a fat joint from the diminishing stash of Farmer Frank’s pot, and hoped for a mercifully swift end to the day.
*
Madelyn arrived in Russian class Monday morning to find two long-stemmed roses on her desk, one red, one white. She glanced at Cole, who stared at the ceiling and pretended to be whistling innocently.
She confronted him after class. “What’s this supposed to be, Lancaster and York?”
He tried, with mixed success, to maintain a grave expression. “Ah, Miss Brooks. The roses are a gift to you, free and clear. If you want to know about my thought processes, however, we’re going to have to open some communication channels. I would need, at a minimum, your first name and phone number.”
He still had his three-ring binder open. Juggling the roses and her books, she picked up his Bic pen and wrote the requested information in large letters across the bottom of his class notes.
“Excellent, uh, Madelyn. Can I call you tonight?”
“Tomorrow would be better.” In fact she had no conflicts; his extortion scheme had merely left her feeling perverse.
He offered his hand to Denise. “I’m Cole.”
“That’s what I hear.” She pumped his hand brusquely. “Denise. How come you don’t have a first name?”
“My parents were too poor to afford one. This is my bass player, Alex.”
They both shook Alex’s hand, then Madelyn hustled Denise away.
“Alex is cute,” Denise said. “Is he Mexican or something?”
“I fear we’re going to get the opportunity to find out.”
“What is it you have against these guys? They’re cute and funny and if they went to private school they must be rich.”
“And that would be the problem.”
“How is that a problem?”
How to sum it up? She struggled for words and finally said, “I’m not… I’m not somebody’s privilege.”
“Gracious! Well, neither am I.”
“I know that, dear. The problem is communicating it to them.”
Cole, of course, called that night, as she’d known he would. Hope had often complained about this very thing; so much enthusiasm in the beginning, so quick to fade. She let her roommate answer the phone and then left the room so that it could truly be said that Madelyn was out. She didn’t enjoy playing games, but she wanted Cole to listen to her.
He called again Tuesday night at 8:00 sharp. She liked to think that he had set himself that arbitrary target and then forced himself to wait for it. He was glib and funny, tossing off compliments that had a hall of mirrors quality, too smooth to be entirely believed, yet so extravagant as to resemble Trojan horses with real feelings hidden inside them.
“I believe you owe me an explanation,” she said at last, “for the roses.”
“Ah. Yes.” For the first time he seemed uncomfortable. “Okay, well, to make it brief, the red rose is passion, the white rose is purity. The red rose is fire, the white rose is ice. You come on like the white rose, and I think you’re really red.”
It was as if, having charmed her defenses away, he had reached through the telephone to touch her under her clothes. His impertinence shocked her even as she caught herself wondering how he knew. A ploy, she told herself, a parlor trick. She tried to get her thoughts in order. “I guess I shouldn’t tell you,” she said, “that I kept the white rose and gave the red one to Denise?” In fact both roses sat on her nightstand in a Coke bottle full of water.
Very quietly Cole said, “You shouldn’t tell me that if it’s not the truth.”
If white was ice, the ice was melting under her feet. “I take it,” she said, equally quietly, “you intend to propose some sort of experiment to test your hypothesis?”
“A preliminary fact-finding session on neutral ground, with observers. You, me, Denise, Alex, dinner and a movie Saturday night. They’re showing Blow-Up on campus and I’ve never seen it.”
“I, for one, would not want to hold back the progress of science, but I can only speak for myself. I think Alex should submit his own agenda to Denise.”
“Is she there now? We could put together the entire grant proposal tonight.”
“Hold on, I’ll see.”
“Wait. You’ll get back on with me after? To iron out the specifics?”
“Assuming the other principal investigators are on board.”
Madelyn found Denise and brought her to the room. Alex kept her on the phone for ten minutes, most of which she spent laughing. When she was done, she handed the phone to Madelyn with an OK sign. Madelyn explained to Cole the arcane process by which he and Alex were to call for them at the downstairs desk on Saturday and they said goodnight.
“Well!” Denise said. “Did a tornado just blow through here?”
“Don’t know yet,” Madelyn said. “Wait till the casualty reports come in.”
*
The awkward moment always came, Madely
n thought, when you left the theater and found out how far your date’s reaction to the movie varied from your own.
So far it had been an unexpectedly pleasant evening. The boys had arrived in, of all things, a Cadillac hearse, with Cole at the wheel. “I lost the toss,” was all he would say. In the absence of a back seat, Alex and Denise sat on pallbearer’s chairs that folded down from the sides. Alex explained to Denise that they used it to move the band’s equipment; he failed to explain the double air mattress and blankets covering the floor, as ominous in their way as the hearse itself.
In a fit of nerves, Madelyn heard herself say, “I’m more of a sports car person. Austin-Healey, Triumph, mg? Not that I’ve ever owned one.”
“I could see you in a sports car,” Cole said.
“Maybe someday.”
The evening, fortunately, improved steadily. Dinner was at Matt’s El Rancho, a Mexican place near Town Lake. The owner had decorated the red-painted walls with posters and other memorabilia from his previous life as a boxer. He escorted them to their table while Cole and Alex showed off their Spanish, asking him questions about his career. Her own Spanish was sufficient to get the gist and to thank Matt politely for holding her chair, which prompted Denise to complain that she didn’t understand a word anyone was saying. The food was delicious, qualitatively different from the El Chico’s fare that her parents occasionally sprang for in Dallas. The only uncomfortable moment came when Madelyn noticed the missing joint on Cole’s right middle finger and asked about it. “Another time,” he’d said, and she’d backed off.
As for the movie, Cole had been completely focused on the screen and, other than putting one arm on the back of her seat, had kept his hands to himself. She especially appreciated his silence during the scene where the photographer had not-entirely-consensual sex with two aspiring models.
Once they were outside, Denise took the lead. “Well,” she said, “that went completely over my head.”
“I liked the Yardbirds,” Alex said. “Beck and Page both, did you see that, Cole? Otherwise, I’m with Denise. Pretentious, pseudo-intellectual, art-house drivel.”
“Took the words right out of my mouth,” Denise said, and laughed loudly.
