Featherless Bipeds (20 page)

“You
bastard!
” she screams again, smashing the body of the guitar against the stage.

“Lola!” Jimmy T cries, “Stop!”

Lola swings the guitar up in the air again. Jimmy T scrambles to his feet, tries to stop his guitar from hitting the stage again. The guitar's body blurs through the air, slams against Jimmy T's hands, the force of the blow knocking him on his ass again. “AAAAAAAAA!” Jimmy T cries, “My hands!”

The guitar is deflected sideways, sails through the dusty stage light beams, then cracks against the edge of the stage and falls onto the floor below, its neck snapped clean from the body. Several people in the crowd below — perhaps believing that they're witnessing an episode in rock ‘n' roll history, perhaps just very drunk, swarm to claim a souvenir piece of the guitar.

“I hate you, Jimmy T,” Lola spits at him.

She stands in front of him, holding a one-fingered-salute in front of his face. Then she jumps from the stage and pushes her way through the crowd, and kicks open the door of the men's washroom. When she emerges seconds later, holding Jimmy T's pants above her head, many in the crowd cheer loudly. Lola then exits the bar, waving Jimmy's pants like a captured enemy flag.

Jimmy T just stands there dumbly, wearing only my sweat towel around his lower half, his wrists bent at awkward angles, his fingers swelling like breakfast sausages.

Then a tall, barrel-chested man enters the Twelve Tribes, like a gunslinger striding through the doors of a saloon in an old western movie. He's got shimmering silver hair pulled back into a long ponytail. He's wearing ultra-hip glasses with purple-tinted lenses, a crisp black shirt and tie under a flawlessly tailored purple suit. The Purple Messiah. Billy VandenHammer is here.

Two other men, even bigger than VandenHammer, both dressed in black suits and black turtlenecks, file in behind him and position themselves on either side of the renowned record producer. VandenHammer says something to one of his bodyguards, and the black-suited hulk walks purposefully towards the stage.

Jimmy T turns to the rest of us, wincing slightly.

“Shit, I think my wrists are broken,” he says. “My fingers, too.”

We are all speechless, our brains still trying to comprehend everything we've just witnessed, but Jimmy T is already formulating a damage control plan.

“Okay, here's what we're gonna do. I obviously can't play guitar now, since my hands and my guitar are wrecked, so I'm gonna go talk to VandenHammer as if I'm just the band's manager. You guys will just have to play without me.”

“What about Lola?” Tristan wonders.

“Oh,” Jimmy T barks, “screw Lola! This ship's setting sail without her, dumb broad.”

Akim says, “What about . . . ”

“Seriously, screw Lola!”

“Jimmy,” Akim says, “are you planning on schmoozing The Purple Messiah of Rock ‘n' Roll with no damned pants on??”

“Oh,” he says, “right. I'll get some. I'll
buy
somebody's pants if I have to!”

Jimmy T leaves the stage holding his swollen hands against his chest, in search of something to cover his lower half. Vanden‐Hammer's bodyguard appears at the foot of the stage seconds later.

“Mr. VandenHammer would like to have a word with your band's representative.”

Akim and Tristan look at me.

“Um, our agent will be with you in just a moment,” I stammer.

“He had to, uh, cover something at the last minute.”

“Mr. VandenHammer is a very busy man,” the black-suited giant says, “I wouldn't suggest that your agent keep him waiting long.”

The bodyguard pushes his way to the back of the bar, resuming his position beside the boss.

“Shit,” Akim says, “we'd better go talk to him ourselves.”

Just as we arrive before Billy VandenHammer, who stands like a purple statue of Buddha, Jimmy T rushes in front of us, wearing a plaid kilt he's borrowed from one of the waitresses.

“Aye, Mister VandenHammer,” he says, using a passable Scottish accent, “So delighted to meet yuh!”

“Who are you?” VandenHammer asks.

“I'm James Tanner, the manager of this talented young group you've some to see tonight,” he says, tentatively extending his hand.

“What's with the skirt?” VandenHammer says.

“It's me trademark,” Jimmy says. “Me kilt, eh? Kinda like yer purple suit.”

“Ah,” VandenHammer says, crushing Jimmy's crippled hand in his vice-like grip. Jimmy's face turns white, but he heroically absorbs the pain of the handshake. “Where's the girl? My source told me you've got a girl singer. Where is she? I want to see her.”

“Uh, do you need to see her, uh, right now?” Jimmy stutters, dropping the Scottish accent.

“She's what we're here for,” VandenHammer says. “But, of course, as the band's manager, I don't have to tell
you
what a hot thing female singers are right now. No girl, no contract. That's the way it is.”

A look of desperation washes over Jimmy T's face. “I'll go get her! Be right back!”

He makes his way over to the table where Sung Li, Veronica, and Zoe have been observing the whole exchange. Akim, Tristan and I stand there in front of Billy VandenHammer and his posse, unsure of what to do or say next. After a few eternal minutes pass, Jimmy T returns, towing Zoe behind him. VandenHammer scans her from head to toe, then he reverses course back to her chest.

“Well,” he says to one of his boys, as if we're not even here, “not exactly what my contact described, but she's pretty hot anyway.”

He peers over the purple lenses of his glasses and looks directly at Zoe with his steely eyes.

“Okay, sweetie, show us what you've got.”

“What?” she says, crossing her arms over her chest.

VandenHammer shakes his head a little, grins slightly.

“I'm a
music
producer, baby. Get up there and
sing
for me, for chrissakes.”

“You heard the man!” Jimmy T barks. “Show him what the Featherless Bipeds are all about.”

He turns and stands beside VandenHammer, crossing his arms in a similar pose. One of the bodyguards grabs him by the shoulders and pulls him away from the boss.

Zoe looks dazed as she follows us to the stage.

“Can you actually sing, Zoe?” Tristan asks.

Zoe nods.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” I ask her.

“I'm sure,” she says. “I want this producer to hear you guys play.”

The crowd hoots and hollers as we take our positions on stage.

Zoe turns to me and says, “Can we do ‘Invitation'?”

“Do you know the words?” Tristan wonders.

“I've known the words since I first heard them in high school,” she says. She is still looking at me when she says this.

Then, Zoe slowly turns to face the spotlight, and something amazing happens.

R
ULE
N
UMBER
O
NE

F
or the Featherless Bipeds, the balance tipped the night Zoe was thrust into the band. I never would have imagined that Zoe could sing like she does until I heard her that night at the Twelve Tribes. Since then, our powerchord rock songs have become sparer sounding without Jimmy T's rhythm guitar playing, but Zoe's voice fills and overflows the spaces left behind.

She has the power and control of an opera diva, the passion and guts of a blues singer, the casual elegance of a jazz crooner, and a certain extra mystique that I still can't quite compare to anything else. Her voice has transformed our songs into something more complex, something that still eludes easy categorization. And to think that I've loved her for all these years and never realized she had this voice locked away inside her, a voice as complex and evasive and beautiful as Zoe herself.

Akim, Tristan and I play every show as if it's the last time, struggling to match the mysterious, otherworldly quality of Zoe's singing. As if someone has waved a magic wand, we have been transformed from a struggling bar band into the Next Big Thing. As we're shipped from concert hall to radio station to recording studio, I still get this strange feeling that I'm watching it all happen from just outside myself, as if none of this is completely real.

Nothing feels more surreal than the day we all gather in Billy VandenHammer's plush, oak-panelled office to sign our recording deal with Big Plastic Records.

“By the way,” Billy says as Zoe reaches for the silver pen to sign her name on the contract's dotted line, “nobody in the band is allowed to have sexual relations with anyone else in the band. Is that clear? It's all about the music now.”

“How is that any of your business?” I sputter.

“It's
totally
my business!” VandenHammer says. “That kind of shit destroys bands. Look at Ike and Tina Turner. Look at Fleetwood Mac, for crying out loud, all screwing each other, all but ruined now. And look what happened when Yoko Ono got her claws into John Lennon. Poof! No more Beatles.”

“Okay,” Akim grins, taking the pen from Zoe and signing the contract, “I promise I won't hump Tristan anymore.”

He hands the pen to Tristan, who signs like he was in a speed-writing competition.

Zoe and I look at each other, then at VandenHammer.

“Rule Number One, kids,” he says, peering at us over the purple lenses of his glasses. “No sexual relations of any kind amongst band members. I'm not investing in you so you can have jealous fights and break up. No way. It's all about the music.”

Jimmy T hovers behind us. “Does Rule Number One apply to me, too, Billy, or am I allowed to sleep with Zoe?”

“Dream on!” Zoe scowls at him.

“You can call me Mr. VandenHammer, Mr. Tanner. And it applies
double
for band managers.”

Zoe looks at me for a moment. Then she sighs, signs her name, and hands me the pen without making eye contact again.

“It's all about the music,” I tell myself as I add my signature to the page.

Now we are on our first cross-country road trip, in support of our newly released first album,
Socrates Kicks Ass!
The tour has been organized by Jimmy T, despite Billy VandenHammer's offer to get someone at the record company to put the tour together. Jimmy T, Tristan and Akim share the job of driving the rented U-Haul equipment van, while Zoe and I take turns behind the wheel of her rust-perforated Toyota.

It is after three am, and we are somewhere between our Friday night gig in Winnipeg and our hotel in Regina, where we will play on Saturday. While Zoe sleeps in the passenger seat, I struggle to keep my heavy eyelids open, and curse Jimmy T for booking such distant gigs on consecutive nights. It's all I can do to keep the Toyota within visual range of the van's tail lights, since Jimmy T is driving at his usual homicidal velocity.

Out of nowhere comes a howling prairie blizzard. It takes all of my concentration to keep the featherweight car on the road. Snow blasts through the headlight beams, concealing the road, rendering the world around us dimensionless; it was like flying through a dense field of stars in a spaceship.

It is a miracle that I am able to see the neon glow of a roadside motel. I pull into the driveway.

“What's going on?” Zoe asks, still groggy from sleep.

“Blizzard. I lost site of the van.”

“Are we in Regina?”

“Not sure exactly. There's a motel. I think it might be safer for us to stay here for the night.”

Zoe stretches and yawns. “Okay,” she says. In a semi-trance, she follows me through the whistling wind into the motel.

At the front desk, a clerk with basset hound eyes pries himself away from the glow of his twelve-inch TV.

“Yep?” he says.

“We need two rooms.”

“We got one left.”

“Two beds?” I ask.

“One.”

I turn to Zoe. “It's okay. I'll sleep on the floor.”

The room is dimly lit and claustrophobic. There are velvet paintings of cowboys and horses hanging on the painted plywood walls. Wind hisses at the windowsills, rattles the siding outside. A neon sign flickers and hums outside the window.

Zoe immediately falls onto her back atop the spongy double bed, arms and legs splayed outward.

“I'm exhausted,” she sighs.

The long, wiry muscles in her arms are stretched tight, like high-voltage wires in the chill of winter. Every line, curve, and shadow of her body appears to quake, to shiver. Each part of her that is not consumed by shadow leaps forth, vibrating, visually crackling from the neon sign buzzing outside the window. The bed and walls of the motel room flicker at the same frequency, sharing the tension.

A volatile emulsion of guilt and desire bubbles inside me.

“It's freezing in here,” she said. “I'm getting under the covers.”

Zoe arches her back, wriggles out of her jeans, kicks them onto the floor, then, without removing her sweatshirt, twists free of her bra, which lands on the cold floor beside her jeans. Like a swimmer springing feet-first from a diving board, she kicks her feet up in the air, then in one fluid motion her body slips beneath the sheets.

Split-second images whirl though my head: an edge of black pubic hair peeking from the crotch of her panties as she pulls off her jeans, a glimpse of a chill-shriveled nipple as she tugs the bra from beneath her sweatshirt, the O-shape of her lips as she plunges beneath the cold sheets.

Blood throbs inside me like the thunder of ritual drums. I turn around, pretend to look out the window at the swirling snow, so she won't see the physical effect she is having on me; the effect she's had on me since we were together in high school.

“I'll, um, sleep on the floor, then,” I manage to say.

Her eyes peek out from under the blankets.

“Oh, come on Dak, you'll freeze out there. We can share for tonight.”