Featherless Bipeds (5 page)
“It's not so bad,” I answer, and I discover that it hurts to smile.
Lola tiptoes in between Veronica and Sung Li.
“Jesus, Dak,” she says, “You didn't have to go this far to prove me wrong.”
“I was just looking for Zoe.”
Lola looks at Zoe. “I get it now.”
“It's okay,” I say. “I probably shouldn't have been mocking Zoe's dad like that, since he might be my father-in-law some day.”
Zoe rolls her eyes.
I reach around Zoe and pat her behind with my bandaged hand, a move that is worth the pain it causes. I know she's not my girlfriend anymore, I know that we are officially “just friends”, but I suspect in this particular circumstance she will let me get away with it.
A nurse steps through the door, looks at the multi-coloured crew gathered around the bed. “Visitors are supposed to be family only,” she says. “I don't think you are all related to this patient.”
“We're all adopted,” I say.
The nurse does not laugh. Everyone but Zoe move towards the door.
“You get better soon, eh, Dak?” Akim says. “You need to get back behind those drums, so we can get this band going.”
“Damn right,” Lola says.
Everyone says goodbye. Tristan winks at me as he pulls the privacy curtain closed.
Zoe rests her head on my shoulder, touches two fingers to my lips, the only two places on my body that aren't pulsing with pain. I slide my hand onto her slender back.
“I'm glad you're going to be okay,” she sighs.
“Glad enough to make you want to be my girlfriend again?”
“Getting there,” she says.
Maybe it's the painkillers, but I feel strangely warm and happy inside. I am going to be in a rock band. I am going to get my girlfriend back. No pain can keep me from smiling now.
Life is good.
Paint
Lyrics â D. Sifter, Music â A. Ganges, T. Low, D. Sifter
(From the album
Socrates Kicks Ass!,
recorded by The Featherless Bipeds)
This kind of paint
has thirty-two colours
and a thousand times more
when you mix 'em together
and maybe a million zillion when
you add black or white (or grey shades)
to the mix
as they age, their tones begin to change
no two are ever exactly the same
some are innocent
some cover guilt
some are contained and can never be spilt
some are green, like gardens and trees
some are red, like bloodshot eyes and skinned knees
some of the colours can't be seen at all
black moonless nights and white blinding snow
Brotherly, Sisterly, Fatherly, Motherly
Pure and Forgiving, Dirty and Ugly
Platonic colours, like backrubs from friends
More are like passions, explode on the sand
This place is ours
It belongs to we two
It hasn't been painted
I'm waiting for you
A
fter the stabbing, Mom and Dad move in with me. Tristan gives up his half of our dorm room for them and stays at Veronica's place â crafty Tristan! Mom cooks me delicious hot meals and cleans our apartment beyond recognition, while Dad repeatedly reminds me of how lucky I am to be alive and what a complete idiot I am to have put myself into such a dangerous situation. When the sting of Dad's criticism begins to outweigh the benefits of Mom's cooking and cleaning, I tell them I'm feeling good enough to take care of myself now, and they go back home to Faireville.
Zoe stops by frequently to check on me and bring me her homemade curry soup and hamburgers from Jafo's. Each time she comes over I try to get her to kiss me like we used to kiss in high school, but she just grins that Mona Lisa grin of hers and says, “You might injure yourself if I let you get too excited.”
Tristan, Akim, Veronica, and Sung Li all take turns dropping in between their classes. Even Lola comes over, acting uncharacteristically shy at first, but I manage to convince her that I hold no hard feelings toward her, that it was all just a big misunderstanding, and that she should keep up the good work fighting racists and misogynists and homophobes and so on. She stops by later with some of the best home-baked chocolate chip cookies I've ever tasted. Who would have guessed that Lola has a little Betty Crocker hiding beneath her Tank Girl exterior?
The university has given me permission to re-enroll as a first year student next year, with no academic penalty. The health insurance policy I got with my university tuition, which I don't even remember signing up for, pays for my rent and my physiotherapy sessions. I've also been doing some exercises of my own. I have re-assembled my drums so they're taller, so I can sit up straighter to play, instead of hunching over the kit and aggravating the wound in my belly. Since I haven't been taking classes, I've had a lot of time on my hands. I play my drums each day until it hurts too much to continue.
Tristan has been jamming with Akim, with Lola joining them on vocals. One day Tristan arrives home from his last class of the day and I'm still pounding away on my drums. Tristan immediately calls Akim, telling him, “Dak is ready to rock.”
Tristan is right. I am ready.
Now it's Saturday, and Tristan and I show up at Akim's place at noon, Tristan lugging his huge Trace Elliot amp in one hand while towing a wheeled road case containing six different bass guitars with the other, and me hefting my drums into the empty garage behind the house where Akim and Sung Lee rent a basement together. Their elderly landlord is mostly blind, so he doesn't have a car, and he's agreed to let us use the empty garage as a rehearsal space. He's also mostly deaf, which means we can play as loud as we want to. Akim has confided that having a deaf landlord has not been bad for his and Sung Li's sex life, either.
Tristan surveys his bass collection and selects his Fender Jazz Bass. He only has two hands, but for some reason he needs six basses. He's got another six sitting idle at home. Maybe he is subconsciously still sticking it to his dad for not letting him play that old Beatle bass. He also removes a small video camera, which he props up on a shelf with a bird's-eye view of the garage.
“For posterity,” he says.
Sung Li helps me carry the big bass drum inside when she notices me wincing slightly. I'm trying not to be a wimp about it, but the scar across my stomach is still pretty tender. When I enter the garage, Tristan and Akim then break into a funky instrumental rendition of that old crooner standard, “Mack the Knife”, singing, “It's Dak the Knife!” as a chorus.
“We learned that one just for you,” Tristan says.
“They've been practicing for days,” Sung Li affirms.
“Tristan wanted to do âCuts Like a Knife', ” Akim says, “but I hate Bryan Adams!”
“Can I see the scar?” Sung Li asks.
I lift my shirt.
“Oooooh,” she says, “does it hurt?”
“Oh, excruciatingly so,” I say, “but I'm very tough.”
“Goof!” Tristan says, putting away the Jazz Bass and pulling out his Washburn five-string with the purple metalflake finish.
“Hey, chicks dig guys with scars,” I tell him. It's sort of true, too. Zoe sometimes runs her finger gently over the dark pink line, but maybe more the way a nurse would than a girlfriend. Patience, Dak, patience.
Relatively speaking, there is hardly any pain at all now, just a dull, throbbing residual ache where the knife entered me, and a sort of hot, searing feeling there when I over-exert myself. I still flinch sometimes when I pass by groups of scruffy teens on the street late at night. But, for the most part, I'm okay. I'm ready to rock.
I look around the garage. It's
Mecca
! A musician's wet dream! Akim has covered both the floor and walls with thick, orange shag carpet, giving the place the free-love ambiance of the interior of a mid-seventies van . . . but, of course, that isn't the point. The carpeting provides good sound insulation to counterbalance the thump of the best garage-band PA system I've ever seen: a thousand-watt Peavey amplifier, a sixteen-channel Mackie mixing board, an equalizer/effects rack (of unknown factory origin â all the labeling is in Korean), two eighteen-inch Electrovoice subwoofers, four Peavey PA speakers with eight ten-inch midrange speakers and a high-frequency horn apiece.
And Akim's guitar gear! Not only does he possess a Fender Twin (the Cadillac of Fender guitar amps), but he also has a large TubeWorks MosValve amp (“Just as good as a Marshall, only cheaper,” according to Akim). Neatly arranged on a tall, lopsided bookshelf is a rainbow-coloured assortment of guitar effect pedals: digital delays, chorus pedals, a wah pedal, flanges, stage equalizers, compressors, at least a half-dozen different distortion pedals, and something called a “Sitar Swami”. If a guitarist really behaves himself, when he dies he'll get to jam in Heaven's garage, which must look pretty much like Akim's.
“Wow.” I say, “How did you ever afford all this stuff?”
“I eat a lot of Kraft Dinner.”
Sung Li rolls her eyes. “And Sung Li has a bursary,” she says. “Have a good jam, boys. I'll be over at Veronica's place.”
Sung Li gets it. She understands that playing guitar, to Akim, is like breathing. It's something that he just
has to do.
She understands that Akim
needs
to have all of this gear, that Tristan
needs
to own at least a dozen bass guitars, and that I
need
to have a drum set with nine drums, seven cymbals, a cowbell tree, and a set of wood blocks.
Sung Li gets it. Akim had better marry her.
I've got all the pieces of my kit positioned exactly the way I like them, and all the skins are tuned nicely. Akim has finally settled on a guitar set-up that doesn't displease his ear too much. Tristan's bass sound is deep, tight, and flawless as usual.
“Now all we need is a singer,” I say, as I diddle lazily along the edges of the snare drum.
Akim looks at his watch.
“Twelve-thirty. I said we'd get together at twelve, right?”
I nod.
“Well, that means Lola should be here any minute. She's always exactly a half hour late for everything. I think NASA calibrates their countdown timers by the accuracy of her lateness.”
The words have just left Akim's mouth when the door to the garage swings open, but it isn't Lola. It's some guy I've never seen before. He's dressed like a mannequin in the Casual Wear Department of Harry Rosen's, wearing about a thousand dollars worth of designer clothes. He's got perfectly coiffed hair, like the plastic hairdo on a Malibu Ken doll. A tiny Traynor practice amplifier swings from his right hand, a guitar case in his left. He drops the guitar and amp on the floor, casually kicks off his gleaming leather shoes, but does not remove his sunglasses, or the unlit cigarette that hangs loosely from his lip. He glances conspicuously at his Rolex.
“Right on time, as always,” he says to himself, then he turns to Tristan and rasps, “Tristan, my man! The bass-playin' machine!”
Then he turns towards me. “Hey, drummer dude! Wicked kit, man!”
He extends his hand towards Akim, “And you must be the maestro of the strat-o-cast-o!”
“Who,” Akim asks incredulously, “the hell are you?”
“Bond,” he says, “James Bond.”
“Guys, meet James Tanner,” Tristan says, shrugging slightly. “He's in my Introduction to Business class. He plays rhythm guitar. I invited him to join in. When we're ready, he can get us some gigs playing bars.”
“I've got the connections, all right, dudes,” James Tanner brags. He gives a small laugh, which triggers a fit of coughing. When his hacking gets to the point where I fear he might eject a lung, he grunts, “Uh. Need a smoke.”
He pulls a Zippo from his front pants pocket, flips the lid open and holds the flame to the cigarette.
“Excuse me, James Tanner,” Akim grunts, “but you can't smoke in here!”
“Sorry, dude,” our overdressed interloper says, turning back to the door. “I'll go outside. By the way, when I'm playing in a rock band, the name's Jimmy T, not James Tanner.”
He coughs a few more dry, death-rattle coughs, then strides out of the garage, wearing a smug expression like he knows something the rest of us don't. As he walks out, Lola walks in.
Lola summarizes what Akim and I are thinking: “Who's the pretty boy?”
“Okay, okay,” Tristan says, “I didn't exactly plan to bring him along, but I told him about the band in class yesterday, and well, he's a hard guy to say no to.”
As if reading our collective mind, he continues. “So he's a bit of a frat boy, but he says he can play guitar, and his dad is the CEO of a big conglomerate that owns Sanderson Breweries, among other things, so he can get the band pretty much any bar gig we want.”
“So Daddy's rich, eh?” Akim scoffs. “Gee, you'd never know it.”
“Big Swinging Dick,” Lola says evenly. “I'll fix him if he gets out of line. Did you see his car, though? Silver Mercedes convertible. Sweet. He must be doing something right do have a car like that.”
“More like his
daddy
is doing something right,” Akim says, then adds, “or something wrong.”
Lola, I must say, looks good. I mean
really
good. I haven't seen her for a while, and the change is dramatic. Her hair is back to what I assume is her natural colour of soft red. Her nose rings are gone, and she's let go of the vampire cloak/military-fatigue outfit in favour of the sort of clingy, figure-hugging things Zoe or Sung Li would wear.
She catches me staring.