Sweeter Life

by Tim Wynveen

  Before the Mitchells went home, Ruby dug some snapshots out of her purse and passed them around: Hank as a toddler, all chubby cheeks and pink skin with a mop of dark brown curls; as a five-year-old, perched on his father’s shoulders and squealing with glee; at ten, scrubbed squeaky clean and modelling his new Sunday suit from the Eaton’s catalogue; as a sixteen-year-old rebel with greasy hair, his arm around the buxom Amy Brousseau.

  “You were such a beautiful little boy,” Ruby said wistfully.

  Izzy couldn’t get over the picture of the clean-cut fellow in the new suit. “Look at you,” she said, a note of laughter in her voice. “Look at your leg. You’re modelling like you’re in the catalogue, for crying out loud.”

  Cyrus brought over the photo of the young dude with his babe. “And look at this one,” he crowed. “Talk about Mr. Cool.”

  Hank wasn’t laughing. People could tell him he’d been happy once, they could show him pictures of a bright-eyed boy, but it meant no more to him than the idea that we are all descendants of apes. Maybe it was true, and maybe it was important, but it all happened a long time ago and, anyway, what could you do with information like that? So he nodded stupidly and said, “Look at that. Some getup.” But his heart wasn’t in it. He breathed a sigh of relief when Ruby and Clarence got up to leave.

  He followed them to the door and thanked them for coming. “And for the sweater,” he added hastily. “It’s nice and warm.”

  “Well,” Ruby said, “you won’t need it for a few weeks yet. But this winter it should come in handy.” Then she knelt down and kissed his cheek. “I know your sister’s awful busy, so any time you need a ride somewhere, you give me a tinkle, will you? I’ll be your chauffeur for the day.”

  Cyrus suddenly pictured Ruby sitting with Peggy Spinks while Hank had an afternoon rendezvous. It was such a surprising yet satisfying image that he nearly laughed out loud.

  Izzy stood behind Hank’s chair, like an anxious mother with a sick child, one hand resting on his shoulder, the other smoothing his cowlick. “Oh, now,” Izzy was saying, “I’m not all that busy. And you’ve already got enough to worry about with Clarence. We can muddle along.”

  HANK’S ROUTINE WAS SHOT TO HELL. Normally he’d watch television after Izzy went to bed, flipping through the channels until he was blind with fatigue. But Cyrus’s presence meant he had to hang out in his room.

  He poked at the synthesizer awhile, but he wasn’t in the mood for making that much effort, so he pulled on his headphones and listened to his favourite radio station until he’d heard the same ads two or three times. By then the steam had left his system, and he settled back a bit and worked his way through his cassettes, none of them from the current decade. He didn’t rock his head or tap his fingers as he listened, just stared out the window at the writhing dance of the maple across the street.

  He’d seen ghosts out there in the shifting shapes of the night, seen his father’s face pressed to the window, the gas station attendant sitting in the tree, Golden Reynolds crouched by the windowsill. It made no difference when Hank closed his eyes because the faces were inside his head. Because of that, sleep was nearly impossible. The only thing that worked was the routine; the only sleep he found was at the end of his endurance when darkness fell upon him in a blink. Even there the faces intruded, shaking him awake a few hours later.

  After he’d listened to every tape in his collection, he put on the cassette Cyrus had given him. He was curious, but he also remembered the last time he had heard his brother play in Toronto and how miserable it had made him feel.

  He leaned forward uneasily, his head full of tape hiss and electronic hum, the amplified whisper of his own breathing. Then, rising out of that background noise, a tremulous sound reminding him of the way poplars quake before a storm. A chord on a keyboard, five notes. And he closes his eyes in a kind of swoon, and sees the driveway of their farm and the poplars that line both sides. Bass and drums creep behind the chord, the kind of rhythm that makes him want to walk, not marching music really but walking music, a rolling gait that moves him step by step down that driveway. He sees the red-brick path that leads to the house. And with the chord quivering and the bass and drums loping along, the guitar begins to sing its melody, leading him up that path, past his mother’s spice garden and into the mud room. It’s all there, everything the way it’s supposed to be. He takes off his rubber boots and his jacket and walks into the old kitchen where his mother sits at the table, feeding dry bread and vegetables and quartered apples into a meat grinder because it’s Thanksgiving and she’s making stuffing for the turkey, the bread-and-vegetable mixture spilling out of the grinder like a rainbow. And she opens her arms and says, “Come here, honey. Give Mommy a hug.” He runs into her velvet embrace, and the smell of onion and carrot and celery mixes with the poultry seasoning and her lilac dusting powder and makes him go shivery and goosebumpy all over.…

  Hank played the song again. And again. And each time he saw more of her: the way she curled her hair around her index finger when she was thinking; her laughter when he tickled her; the sound of her singing around the house, always singing, in a voice that made people think of Doris Day.

  As he sat in the darkness of his room, lit only by the street light and the eerie glow of his stereo, he realized that throughout his entire life he had bumped against the same pains, the same horrors—the man with the belt, the man with the freckled face, the man with the radio, the man with the friends and favours—but never a trace of her, coming to believe that he would never see her face again, that she had slipped irretrievably into the blackness. And how ironic that a man without a future, a man whose every waking moment had been indelibly stamped by the past, would find it so hard to remember. He could speak her name but feel nothing, see nothing but a few bland images. Now suddenly there she was. She was in his brother’s music, a living, breathing presence again.

  SIX

  Ronnie had not only made the most money from the Jimmy Waters Revival, he had gained the most respect. Perhaps he wasn’t in the same league as Colonel Tom Parker or Brian Epstein, but look what he had to work with. Jimmy Waters was an impossible act to sell compared to Elvis and the Beatles. That Ronnie had succeeded at all was regarded as a matter of brilliance.

  As a result, when he went shopping his new band around, people were eager to accommodate him, wanting to get in on the ground floor of the next big thing. “Jangle,” they said, “yes, we are very interested.” With a minimum of effort he arranged a showcase in Hollywood at the Troubadour. Every A&R director of every major label would be there.

  Throughout the autumn, Ronnie’s staff worked on a promo package while he hired a road crew. (No luck talking Adrian or Kerry or Tommy Mac back into the fold.) Raoul Dupree had settled on a design he called “quotidian chaos,” the very look of a sound check in mid-stride, with cases and cables and equipment scattered everywhere, and the road crew’s muscular shuffle an integral part of the show. When the band was established and able to fill large venues, there would be a suspension bridge that would rise above the clutter and, at certain key moments in the show, extend into the audience so that Cyrus could wander among his fans.

  From November to just before Christmas, Nate Wroxeter booked a series of club dates so the band could work out the kinks, test their set for weak spots and awkward transitions, and give Cyrus, a lifelong sideman, a chance to rev up his stage presence. The crowds were largely enthusiastic, and each gig made the whole project seem larger and more inevitable. By the end of the stress test, Ronnie knew he had a roadworthy machine. The band members were strong, confident, and required little or no maintenance, their edges and angles fitting together like cogs of a wheel. The crew worked equally well. And because there were natural leaders in both groups, Ronnie’s job would be a cinch.

  Finally, on January 24, 1982, the band walked onstage at the Troubadour. Cyrus said, “I’d like to tell you a story now, if I may.” And they launched into the dreamy intro of “The Bri
dge.” Cyrus managed to move around the stage and look comfortable doing so, but he was mostly unconscious of who he was and what he was doing. He was blinded by the lights, deaf to any sound other than the band, numb to any feeling other than the music of his life passing through him like a flood.

  THE VISIBLE PART OF THE EAR, the seashell, collects sound waves from the world and funnels them down the waxy canal to the eardrum, which converts those waves—crest, trough and amplitude—into mechanical vibrations. The eardrum also separates the outer ear from the middle ear, which is an ingenious little gizmo not unlike the tubes of an amplifier. With the help of three small connected bones—the malleus, the incus and the stapes—the middle ear amplifies the vibrations from the eardrum and passes them on to a much smaller opening called the oval window, which looks on to the inner ear. It’s there, in a snail-like contraption called the cochlea, that the business of hearing gets interesting. The cochlea is filled with fluid and thousands of special nerve endings called hair cells. When the mechanical vibrations on the oval window disturb the fluid, the hair cells dance like seaweed on the ocean floor, and that movement sends an electric impulse through the auditory nerve to the brain, which is where it all comes together. Our ears don’t hear words or melody or silence. They are a fancy bit of science designed to receive energy, modify it, break it down and pass it on.

  What Ronnie heard at the Troubadour, the translation of wave to vibration to electric impulse, sounded remarkably like love. So much so that at the end of the first song, he was struck with utter clarity that he loved this boy like a son. This bridge they had built together, this cascade of notes, this arrangement of light and shade, colour and shape, was nothing more than a bridge between the two of them.

  With Jim it had been different. Ronnie had wanted to hear that glorious solo again, a longing on par with the search for philosophical truth or mathematical purity. It was the music that led him to the man. But with Cyrus, it was the other way around. Ronnie found the boy, a child alone in the darkness, before he found the music; and together they had fumbled toward this riot of notes that now filled the room. No question, Ronnie wanted Jangle to be successful, but for the boy’s sake, not his own. That realization had caught him off guard. His own desires had taken a back seat. He only wanted Cyrus to be happy, the very thing a father might say.

  When the last note sounded and the band left the stage, Ronnie got to his feet and began to mingle. He shared words with Clive Davis, Mo Ostin, David Geffen and a dozen other hitmakers, and it was clear that they had listened but not heard. Their eyes gave no sign of understanding. They said the right words—“Ron, fantastic, call me, we’ll talk.”—but their eyes were full of distance and pity. At one time or another they had all been in his shoes, hearing the magic no one else could hear, seeing the future no one would believe. They backed quickly away lest he taint them with the evil eye.

  Ronnie was a good sport. He held no grudges. He made no judgments. It wasn’t about money or the big deal. As far as he was concerned, it wasn’t even about music. It was about the boy. And when he had had a good stiff drink and prepared his face and tone and words, he headed backstage to tell the band how it really was, not how it was perceived. They believed him, too, because they could see the emotion shining in his eyes.

  The party began soon after. The big names had stolen away, leaving behind the lesser lights and media freeloaders, people too naive to notice or too cynical to care that there was nothing to celebrate. Cyrus and the rest of the band fell into the first category. They dug into the drinks and nibbles with the ferocity of conquering heroes. They laughed and waved their arms madly. They were big and loud and full of themselves. The change, to Ronnie’s eye, was bittersweet; and although he was happy enough to allow the illusion to remain, he wondered how long it would last.

  His own evening had been spoiled. Aside from the band’s performance, nothing had gone as it should. But he would keep that grief to himself and let Cyrus enjoy his moment. To see him there among those people, savouring his own power, made Ronnie smile. It was like the boy had been transformed into pure energy.

  IF HOLLYWOOD TAUGHT CYRUS anything it was that bliss has many faces but only one name. He could make the case, with a good deal of certainty, that their gig at the Troubadour was the very pinnacle of his life to date, and that all other high points and low points were merely stations of the cross on the way to that pivotal moment. He stood in the spotlight and the music poured out of him, as though all he had ever felt, all he had ever known or remembered, came flooding out in those few brief songs. To his right, to his left, behind him even, were his fellow band members. To call them friends would minimize their importance. Call them brothers, soul-mates who had joined the common cause, who had suffered together, laughed together, broken bread and debauched together, in the trenches, on the bus, who had opened themselves to each other and created a joyful noise.

  And what on the scale of excitement could compare to playing for a roomful of Hollywood big shots, to feel with every note he played, every gliss, every bend, every hammer-on, that he had moved out of the realm of make-believe and into that higher reality where dreams come true, where the pretty high school girl becomes a model or movie star, where the poor young ghetto kid makes the NBA, where the geek with his electric guitar stands in front of Clive Davis and David Geffen and they listen and applaud and take him seriously.

  When the show was over, when he and the rest had stepped backstage, the feeling remained, the sizzle and spark lit up the room and passed from one to the other as they recounted who played what and how brilliant it was. Then Ronnie came in and testified, and his eyes were wild, his voice high with excitement, and yes, he said, the sound had been glorious out front, and yes, he had heard the fire and the passion and it was stunning, all of it, all of it perfectly stunning.

  And in this way bliss begets bliss. As the adrenalin seeped away, as the flash of artistic triumph began to fade, Cyrus wandered into the club, where food and drink had been arranged, mountains of shrimp, platters of smoked salmon and cold cuts and exotic fruits and dips. He’d never had a better-tasting beer than the one just then, a necessary reward. And in the presence of all that food, he discovered his raw emptiness. He gorged on delicacies until Ronnie introduced him to so-and-so of the L.A. Times and what’s-her-face from Billboard, to this person here and that one there, each and every one of them gushing with praise. And wasn’t that a beautiful woman, and wasn’t she smiling in his direction, with the second beer tasting better than the first, and the food tasting better, too, and the woman looking better each time she turned his way, with her white silk blouse and cleavage, her tight jeans, and the way she smiled in a way that made him smile. And all the while people were pumping his hand and plying him with drinks and food until there, on an admittedly lower level, in a darker and more primitive part of his brain, he runs smack into a particularly sticky patch of bliss, thick and rich and sweet as honey.

  And as these things happen, they all head back to the hotel suite where drinks are plentiful, and people offer drugs, and the woman (he’ll never remember her name) attaches herself to his side and pumps him up whenever the post-adrenalin fatigue threatens to wear him down, pumps him up with the simplest things, a whispered word, a touch of hand, a certain leaning look that offers the promise of anything he might dream, hanging on his every word, his every move, until the night reaches a certain kind of equilibrium, or perhaps more accurately a certain imbalance, and he takes her hand and leads her to his room where they coil like snakes on the bed—the hissing kisses and hard slithering bodies of fundamental bliss.

  What eats at him as she dresses to leave, and especially the next morning on the flight home to Toronto and Eura, is that he’s noticed a definite pattern going back as far as his thoughtless behaviour in Fenton and the Pink Pussycat: the arc of his bliss moves in one direction, only ever backward, from the sacred to the profane, from the glittering present to the murky primordial past.

 
; FOR RONNIE, THE PARTY ENDED AT SIX in the morning when the band began tossing wineglasses from the balcony into the big fountain in front of the hotel. With a sharp, almost military tone of voice, Ronnie snapped the lads back into focus and sent them off to bed. Alone at last, he called Brent in New York and got him to set up an appointment with RonCon’s accountant and bank manager. He then dialed Nigel Cranston at his flat in Chelsea.

  Nigel, a guitarist in the early days of British rock and roll, was now one of the premier producers in the world, Britain’s king of alternative rock. But few people in the business knew that he owed his later success to Ronnie, who had taken him one evening to a club in London to hear a group of angry young men called The Brothers Heisenberg. The Brothers had approached Ronnie to be their manager, but with Jimmy at the top of the charts and on his second tour of Europe, Ronnie didn’t have the time or enthusiasm for the project. So he foisted The Brothers on to his friend Nigel, who not only signed them to his production company but produced their first record, Everything Is Everything, a pretentious bit of art rock that sat on the Billboard Hot 100 for three solid years.

  When the transatlantic connection was established, Ronnie said, “Nigel, it’s Conger.”

  “You old ponce. How are you?”

  “Couldn’t be better. Out here in Hollywood just now showcasing a new act. All very exciting, I can tell you. But, how shall I say this, I’m afraid I need a favour.”

  “I was beginning to think you would never ask.”

  “I need your exemplary talent, Nigel, and your imprimatur and whatever positive spin I can muster.”

  “The showcase didn’t go down all that well, I take it.”

  “Well enough that I could secure a contract, I suppose. These people down here are all money men. They only know the deal, not the music. That’s why I want you. This project means the world to me. And as I sit here in the cold light of dawn, after listening to an outpouring of music like you can scarcely imagine, I can’t bring myself to let these bloodless bastards have it. They don’t deserve it, they won’t appreciate it, and in the end, won’t know what to do with it.”