Outside the Gates of Eden

by Lewis Shiner

  Cole was hot with embarrassment. “Sorry,” he said. “I really want to play with you.” In a fit of self-consciousness he added, “Music, I mean. In a band.”

  She nodded. “I know a drummer, Linda Henried. Her band may be about to break up. She’s good. Maybe she can bring her bass player along for a trial run, see what happens.”

  “Sounds great.”

  “Aren’t you going to ask if she, you know, likes girls too?”

  “No,” Cole said.

  “That’s good. Now if you can keep from thinking it, you’ll be getting somewhere.”

  “Are you this tough on all the guys?”

  “I’ve mostly been in all-girl bands, to tell you the truth. Guys can be a fucking pain in the ass. But I think there might be hope for you.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Cole said, not sure if he was being sarcastic. “Can we talk about a song list?”

  *

  Linda was in fact a terrific drummer in the Keith Moon/John Bonham mold. She stood five six, big in the chest and thighs, with muscular arms and straight brown hair cut in short bangs. She locked down a tempo as tightly as anyone Cole had ever heard, with plenty of dynamics and syncopation and an overall sense that not even an atom bomb could derail her.

  The bass player, Jonathan somethingorother, wore tie-dyed T-shirts and had a fringe beard with no mustache. He lacked sparkle and Cole didn’t think he’d make the final lineup.

  The biggest problem was reconciling Linda’s big drum sound with the songs where Cole wanted to play acoustic and Valentina was also on acoustic or harp. When Linda admitted that she was taking conga lessons, the last pieces fell into place.

  Cole argued against the Crosby, Stills and Nash “wooden” versus electric dichotomy, and wanted to mix it all up, all the time. He also pushed for more songs in Spanish. Linda spoke a little Spanish and sang backup, so her vote carried the day. Behind songs like “Perfidia” and “Cielito lindo,” the harp let loose cascades of trilling notes and thick powerful chords that sounded like dry dust and ancient civilizations and dancing women flicking long white embroidered skirts. The rock songs, meanwhile, shook the walls, thanks to Linda’s power drumming and Valentina’s violin.

  The first practice, rough as it was, eliminated any doubts about going forward. They set up a four-day-a-week rehearsal schedule, and afterward, when Jonathan and Linda had left, Cole and Valentina would sit at her kitchen table and work on the set list and arrangements. Gradually they told each other their stories.

  She’d been born in Veracruz, and learned violin in the school orchestra. She’d picked up the harp in Parque Zamora, where her father got his start selling records out of cardboard boxes on Sunday afternoon under the palm trees. He loved every kind of music, but his absolute favorite was danzón, the stately, clarinet-driven melodies that brought dancers in their white suits and hats to La Plaza de Armas on Friday and Saturday nights. Second came son jarocho, with its high-strung requinto guitars and harp, and its relentless, churning rhythms. He bought records wherever he could find them cheap, cleaned them, played them until he got tired of them, and then sold them for a profit. When Valentina was born, the first of six children, her mother was supporting the family as a waitress. Within five years her father had a mail-order business and was selling to collectors in the US. He’d saved enough to move the family to El Paso, where one of his best customers had a record store. Her father had started as a clerk and ended up owning the place, and Valentina had worked weekends to pay for music lessons and instruments of her own.

  She dug out a scratchy old record by Lino Chavez, the godfather of son jarocho, and Cole loved it immediately, at the same time that he found it maddeningly familiar.

  “That’s because of Ritchie Valens,” Valentina said. “‘La Bamba’ is an old son jarocho.”

  “We have to do it.”

  She showed him a pained expression. Her own cover choices tended toward Zeppelin’s “Black Dog” or Blue Cheer’s “Just a Little Bit” or Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid.” “How are you going to explain this to a promoter?” she said. “What are you going to put on a poster that tells people who we are?”

  “We need the right band name,” Cole said. “Then, after people hear us, we become our own genre.”

  Valentina sighed heavily. “I suppose you want something in Spanish.”

  «Claro que sí.»

  She thought for a minute. “How about Los Lobos?”

  “Wolves are too violent.”

  “Los Pájaros? Like a joke on The Byrds?”

  “Gringos can’t pronounce it. They’d say puh-jar-ohs.” They both looked at the scarred tabletop for a while, then Cole said, “Los Cuervos. Easy to pronounce, people know it from the tequila.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Plus, it sounds like curvas, which could be a reference to your curves, as in, tantas curvas y yo sin frenos.”

  “Watch it, Cole.”

  “Not speaking for myself, of course.”

  “Right.” Her mouth spasmed briefly. “Meanwhile, we’ve got another problem. Jonathan is not making it.”

  “No.”

  “I was thinking. What would really fit with these lunatic ideas of yours would be a standup bass player, somebody with some jazz chops.”

  Cole immediately heard Eldee Young in his head, the long, groaning, descending riff in the Ramsey Lewis instrumental of “The In Crowd.” “Oh, hell yeah. That’s a great idea. Where do we find one?”

  “I guess we go looking.”

  And so they did. Joe’s 6th Street Deli, Cactus Café, the Victory Grill in East Austin, wherever there was a jazz jam session. It was frustrating, but mostly fun. Cole still felt like she didn’t respect him, and it stung when she directed her sarcasm at him. On the other hand, it did keep him from kidding himself that they were out on a date. Meanwhile, they put up ads at all the music stores and Valentina called the director of the ut Jazz Orchestra.

  The first outcome was that Jonathan showed up for practice on a Wednesday afternoon without his equipment and on a slow boil. “I saw an ad at Straight Music looking for a bass player and it had your phone number on it.”

  Valentina said, “What, were you looking for another gig?”

  “None of your business what I was looking for. If you’re going to fire me, you could have had the guts to tell me to my face.”

  “Sorry,” Valentina said. “We were hedging our bets. We didn’t want to fire you until we were sure we had somebody better.”

  Her frankness knocked Jonathan off his high ground. His face got red and he said, “Well, well, well, I hope you… I hope you don’t find anybody.” He banged the screen door on his way out.

  Their first audition was that weekend. Receding sandy hair, tattoos on his forearms, mid-thirties. In the course of an hour he mentioned Charles Bukowski twice, referring to him as “Hank,” and alluded to a stint in the Navy. Cole, recognizing something in his demeanor, offered him a beer. From the gratitude in his eyes and the haste, in spite of himself, with which he drank it, Cole suspected trouble. Despite a solid rockabilly technique, the feel of the Mexican tunes eluded him. “I can pick it up,” he said. “I just need to hear it some more.”

  Cole and Valentina nodded, and after he left they looked at each other and said, “No.”

  Number two had hair to the middle of his back and a full beard. It quickly came out that he had a few years’ experience on electric bass and only a few months on acoustic. “I’m picking it up pretty fast,” he said. “I know I’ve got a ways to go.”

  Number three was a ut student named Aaron with great technique and not a lot of soul. He was not up for road trips and would have to miss a week here and there because of concerts and exams. Valentina explained that it was a problem, and he shrugged and said, “Oh well.” As he was hoisting his bass to carry it back to the car, and as Cole was remembering the agonizing months in San Francisco before Gordo, Aaron said, “You know… there’s a guy that graduated two years ago tha
t was pretty hot shit. I think he might be what you’re looking for.”

  By the time Luke Buckler called two weeks later, they had to be reminded who Aaron was. Linda was on the verge of quitting, her refrain of “Sucks without a bass” getting louder every practice, and their momentum had stalled.

  Luke was from Lubbock, where he’d grown up loving Buddy Holly, and especially Buddy’s upright bass player, Joe Mauldin. His bass looked like it had lost a couple of bar fights, and had a Shure ball mike duct-taped under the tailpiece. He showed up for his audition wearing a short-sleeved dress shirt and red-brown double-knit slacks and K-Mart shoes with buckles, and he had a flat-top haircut that hadn’t been in style since The Day the Music Died. He used the word “gosh” in conversation, especially when talking to Valentina, with whom he had clearly fallen in love at first sight.

  On the country and rockabilly songs, he was great from the start, snapping the strings, slapping the fingerboard between notes, spinning the bass on its endpin. He was good on the blues, and though he got buried on the loud rock, his time was in the pocket. Only on “Cielito lindo” and one of Cole’s songs with a reggae backbeat did he fail to swing.

  “I hate to do this,” Valentina told him, “but can you wait outside for a few minutes while we talk this over?”

  “That Mexican stuff—no offense—kind of threw me,” he said, looking only at Valentina. He wasn’t pleading, quite. “But I can get it. And I need to listen to that Zeppelin song some more…”

  “Don’t worry,” she said, and gave him a smile to build a dream on. “We threw a lot of different stuff at you.”

  Once he was outside, Cole said, “I think he’s worth a shot.”

  “Fuck yes,” Valentina said. “He’s obviously got the shit. I just wanted him to think we had the upper hand. Linda?”

  Linda, who was not a talker, stuck up one thumb.

  “Where did he get that haircut, though?” Cole said. “I bet he has to go to Lubbock for it.”

  “I thought he was kind of cute,” Valentina said. When Cole stared at her in disbelief, she said, “Just fucking with you, Cole.”

  “He’s in love with you,” Cole said.

  Valentina shrugged. “It happens.”

  *

  Madelyn woke up at 2:07 am. The date was September 27, 9/27, and nine equaled two plus seven. It was the 243rd day of her pregnancy, counting from conception—the doctors insisted on counting from the first day of her last period, which had nothing to do with anything—another two and another seven, if you added the three and four. The numbers were ridiculously auspicious. Evidently Ava agreed, because she had let Madelyn know she was ready.

  Madelyn had been thinking of her as Ava starting four months in, as if the idea had come from the child and not from her own imagination. She liked the fact that it was a palindrome, that it evoked Eve and the Garden, that it went from A quite nearly to Z and back again in three letters, that it reminded her of Ava Gardner, smart and beautiful and unapologetic about her sexuality.

  She had to sit on a white plastic lawn chair in the shower. After drying off, she put on eyeliner and mascara and got dressed. She packed her suitcase for the hospital, then compared the contents to the list she’d written weeks ago. She was pleased to see that she’d remembered everything. After one last check in the mirror, she went to wake up her father.

  If she’d thought she had a prayer of succeeding, she would have asked to drive. Her father was so nervous that she had to warn him repeatedly about speeding and red lights. Her mother sat in the back seat and smiled and shook her head. Fortunately the streets of North Dallas at 3:00 on a Friday morning were empty of danger.

  By the time they got to Presbyterian Hospital, the contractions were coming every three minutes and lasting more than a minute each. She felt the hormones kick in. The naturopath she’d been seeing had told her that her body’s own painkillers would be released with each contraction and that the painkillers in turn would enhance the next round of contractions. She was giddy, and the contrast between the stories she’d heard about unendurable pain and what she was actually feeling only increased her sense of her own good luck. The good luck to get knocked up by her perpetual adolescent of an ex-husband? The thought made her giggle because it was so self-evidently true.

  She was barely on the gurney when her water broke. The contractions slowed, then started to come in double waves. The ob nurse wheeled her into an exam room and took her vitals and asked her to describe how she was feeling. Madelyn giggled again and the nurse turned to her father. “Is she on something?”

  Her father blinked in confusion. “On something?”

  Her mother said, “She’s fine. I was the same way when I had her.”

  The nurse, skeptical, looked under Madelyn’s gown. She had a furtive quality that Madelyn found hilarious. “Can you stop laughing, please?” the nurse said. “You’re crowning. We need to get you to Delivery.”

  Ava took her time, waiting another hour to fully emerge. As the doctor held her up to evaluate her Apgar score, Ava was already losing the reddish-purple color she’d worn in the birth canal and turning to gold. She was perfect. The doctor confirmed it, telling the nurses, “Take a look. You don’t see too many perfect tens.”

  At that moment Madelyn realized that the bare-bones existence she had imagined for the two of them was not going to suffice. To be worthy of this child, she herself would have to be more and better. She would have to remake herself in the image of her own excellence.

  The nurses crowded in to see, which prompted Ava to let go a long stream of golden urine that soaked the doctor’s gown. Madelyn laughed and Ava laughed. Madelyn reached out and took Ava to her breast.

  *

  The Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Ava dozed between Madelyn’s breasts while Madelyn read Pride and Prejudice aloud. Ava liked British writers best, and Henry James the best of the Americans. Something in the formal cadence of the language soothed her.

  Mail fluttered through the front door slot, and Ava allowed her to slowly get up and collect it. The only envelope addressed to her had familiar handwriting that she couldn’t quite place. The note inside had no salutation:

  “Look, this is ridiculous. You and I have always had our own friendship that has nothing to do with Cole, especially when we were in New York together. Now we’re both in Dallas and you must have had your baby, and I’m dying of curiosity and I miss you. If you will just call me, none of it will get back to Cole unless you specifically request otherwise.”

  It was signed “Love, Alex,” and had his phone number below the signature. She felt so grateful that she started to cry. Lately she cried because of the particular blue of the sky or the background music in tv commercials, so she had a Kleenex handy. She blew her nose and dialed Alex’s number.

  1977

  Cole nearly backed out more times than he could count. Even as he stood outside the offices of Bill Graham Presents, in a run-down South of Market neighborhood full of warehouses and old Victorians that had been chopped up into apartments, he wanted to turn around and get on a plane back to Austin.

  Instead he opened the door and stepped inside. A woman in her 20s was at the front desk, dark brown hair, big smile. “Can I help you?”

  “Is Bill in?”

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “No,” Cole said. “I don’t imagine this will take that long. He’ll scream his head off and maybe throw me out a window, and that’ll be that. Probably five minutes, tops.”

  “Uh oh,” she said. “What did you do?”

  “You don’t want to know,” Cole said.

  She picked up the phone. “What’s your name, so I can notify next of kin?”

  “Cole. Jeff Cole. Formerly of The Quirq. There’s a good chance he won’t even see me.”

  “I’m Regina,” she said, and squeezed his hand briefly. “There’s a Jeff Cole here for you,” she said into the phone.

  Cole heard Graham’s response both through the e
arpiece of the phone and from the depths of the office. “Jeff cole? Jeff Cole from the fucking quirq?” Regina held the phone away from her ear and winced.

  “It’s only been eight years,” Cole said. “I don’t know why I thought he might have cooled down.”

  Before Regina could respond, Cole heard a door crash open and Graham yell, “Where is he?”

  “My advice?” Regina said. “Run for your life.”

  Graham emerged from a hallway. He looked the same as ever, hair still dark, body stocky and fit, wearing loose jeans and a Rolling Stones T-shirt. Cole remembered how he’d always felt a smile lurking behind Graham’s rages, as if it was all a put-on. He didn’t see that smile now.

  Cole looked down, clasped his hands behind his back, and left himself completely open to a physical attack. Graham stood with the toes of his shoes against the toes of Cole’s shoes, went up on tiptoe and leaned forward. “you have the unmitigated fucking gall to come into my office? into MY office? you fuck! you ungodly piece of fucking shit! do you have any idea what you did? you made me give money back to promoters! thousands of fucking dollars, you cost me! do you have any IDEA how much i hate to give money back to promoters?”

  Cole started to say, “I’m sorry,” and Graham upped the volume to cut him off. “do not dare open your fucking mouth! there is no apology for what you did!”

  The tirade went on and on. It felt like hours, but surely was no longer than five agonizing minutes. When Graham was finally done, without ever having stopped for breath, he said, “now get the fuck out of my office and do not ever show your face to me again!”

  Cole turned slowly and walked outside. His ears rang and his face was damp from Graham’s spittle. He dried his face on his T-shirt and decided that it had gone about as well as he’d expected.

  The warm February afternoon blazed with sunshine. Cole had rented a Chevy Vega hatchback at the airport, and he drove it up 11th Street to Market, where the Fillmore West had been. The building was deserted. In keeping with the penitential theme of the day, he crossed over to Oak Street and drove to the apartment he’d shared with Madelyn and Lenny, two of the people he’d loved most in his life, both of whom wanted nothing more to do with him. The paint was peeling off the old wooden siding, and the surrounding neighborhood had continued the downhill course it had been on in 1969—cardboard for window panes, unrepaired damage from fire and decay, broken glass and dog shit on the sidewalk.