Rock On (59 page)

For an instant he felt a breathless wonder come over him. The drug had worked, had changed him. He tried to hang on to the strangeness but it slipped away. He was tuning a guitar. It was something he knew how to do.

He played “Freeway Jam,” one of Max Middleton’s tunes from
Blow By Blow.
Again, for just a few seconds, he felt weightless, ecstatic. Then the guitar brought him back down. He’d never noticed what a pig the Silvertone was, how high the strings sat over the fretboard, how the frets buzzed and the machines slipped. When he couldn’t remember the exact notes on the record he tried to jam around them, but the guitar fought him at every step.

It was no good. He had to have a guitar. He could hear the music in his head but there was no way he could wring it out of the Silvertone.

His heart began to hammer and his throat closed up tight. He knew what he needed, what he would have to do to get it. He and Karen had over $1300 in a savings account. It would be enough.

He was home again by three o’clock with the purple Jackson soloist and a Fender Princeton amp. The purple finish wasn’t nearly as ugly as he remembered it and the guitar fit into his hands like an old lover. He set up in the living room and shut all the windows and played, eyes closed, swaying a little from side to side, bringing his right hand all the way up over his head on the long trills.

Just like Jeff Beck.

He had no idea how long he’d been at it when he heard the phone. He lunged for it, the phone cord bouncing noisily off the strings.

It was Karen. “Is something wrong?” she asked.

“Uh, no,” Felix said. “What time is it?”

“Five thirty.” She sounded close to tears.

“Oh shit. I’ll be right there.”

He hid the guitar and amp in his studio. She would understand, he told himself. He just wasn’t ready to break it to her quite yet.

In the car she seemed afraid to talk to him, even to ask why he’d been late. Felix could only think about the purple Jackson waiting for him at home.

He sat through a dinner of Chef Boyardee Pizza, using three beers to wash it down, and after he’d done the dishes he shut himself in his studio.

For four hours he played everything that came into his head, from blues to free jazz to “Over Under Sideways Down” to things he’d never heard before, things so alien and illogical that he couldn’t translate the sounds he heard. When he finally stopped Karen had gone to bed. He undressed and crawled in beside her, his brain reeling.

He woke up to the sound of the vacuum cleaner. He remembered everything, but in the bright morning light it all seemed like a weirdly vivid hallucination, especially the part where he’d emptied the savings account.

Saturday was his morning for yard work, but first he had to deal with the drug business, to prove to himself that he’d only imagined it. He went into the studio and lifted the lid of the guitar case and then sat down across from it in his battered blue-green lounge chair.

As he stared at it he felt his love and terror of the guitar swell in his chest like cancer.

He picked it up and played the solo from “Got the Feelin’,” and then looked up. Karen was standing in the open door.

“Oh my god,” she said. “Oh my god. What have you done?”

Felix hugged the guitar to his chest. He couldn’t think of anything to say to her.

“How long have you had this? Oh. You bought it yesterday, didn’t you? That’s why you couldn’t even remember to pick me up.” She slumped against the door frame. “I don’t believe it. I don’t even believe it.”

Felix looked at the floor.

“The bedroom air conditioner is broken,” Karen said. Her voice sounded like she was squeezing it with both hands; if she let it go it would turn into hysteria. “The car’s running on four bald tires. The TV looks like shit. I can’t remember the last time we went out to dinner or a movie.” She pushed both hands into the sides of her face, twisting it into a mask of anguish.

“How much did it cost?” When Felix didn’t answer she said, “It cost everything, didn’t it? Everything. Oh god, I just can’t believe it.”

She closed the door on him and he started playing again, frantic scraps and tatters, a few bars from “Situation,” a chorus of “You Shook Me,” anything to drown out the memory of Karen’s voice.

It took him an hour to wind down, and at the end of it he had nothing left to play. He put the guitar down and got in the car and drove around to the music stores.

On the bulletin board at Ray Hennig’s he found an ad for a guitarist and called the number from a pay phone in the strip center outside. He talked to somebody named Sid and set up an audition for the next afternoon.

When he got home Karen was waiting in the living room. “You want anything from Safeway?” she asked. Felix shook his head and she walked out. He heard the car door slam and the engine shriek to life.

He spent the rest of the afternoon in the studio with the door shut, just looking at the guitar. He didn’t need to practice; his hands already knew what to do.

The guitar was almost unearthly in its beauty and perfection. It was the single most expensive thing he’d ever bought for his own pleasure, but he couldn’t look at it without being twisted up inside by guilt. And yet at the same time he lusted for it passionately, wanted to run his hands endlessly over the hard, slick finish, bury his head in the plush case and inhale the musky aroma of guitar polish, feel the strings pulse under the tips of his fingers.

Looking back he couldn’t see anything he could have done differently. Why wasn’t he happy?

When he came out the living room was dark. He could see a strip of light under the bedroom door, hear the snarling hiss of the TV. He felt like he was watching it all from the deck of a passing ship; he could stretch out his arms but it would still drift out of his reach.

He realized he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. He made himself a sandwich and drank an iced-tea glass full of whiskey and fell asleep on the couch.

A little after noon on Sunday he staggered into the bathroom. His back ached and his fingers throbbed and his mouth tasted like a kitchen drain. He showered and brushed his teeth and put on a clean T-shirt and jeans. Through the bedroom window he could see Karen lying out on the lawn chair with the Sunday paper. The pages were pulled so tight that her fingers made ridges across them. She was trying not to look back at the house.

He made some toast and instant coffee and went to browse through his tapes. He felt like he ought to try to learn some songs, but nothing seemed worth the trouble. Finally he played a Mozart symphony that he’d taped for Karen, jealous of the sound of the orchestra, wanting to be able to make it with his hands.

The band practiced in a run-down neighborhood off Rundberg and IH35. All the houses had large dogs behind chain link fences and plastic Big Wheels in the driveways. Sid met him at the door and took him back to a garage hung with army blankets and littered with empty beer cans.

Sid was tall and thin and wore a black Def Leppard T-shirt. He had acne and blond hair in a shag to his shoulders. The drummer and bass player had already set up; none of them looked older than 22 or 23. Felix wanted to leave but he had no place else to go.

“Want a brew?” Sid asked, and Felix nodded. He took the Jackson out of its case and Sid, coming back with the beer, stopped in his tracks. “Wow,” he said. “Is that your ax?” Felix nodded again. “Righteous,” Sid said.

“You know any Van Halen?” the drummer asked. Felix couldn’t see anything but a zebra striped headband and a patch of black hair behind the two bass drums and the double row of toms.

“Sure,” Felix lied. “Just run over the chords for me, it’s been a while.” Sid walked him through the progression for “Dance the Night Away” on his three-quarter-sized Melody Maker and the drummer counted it off. Sid and the bass player both had Marshall amps and Felix’s little Princeton, even on ten, got lost in the wash of noise.

In less than a minute Felix got tired of the droning power chords and started toying with them, adding a ninth, playing a modal run against them. Finally Sid stopped and said, “No, man, it’s like this,” and patiently went through the chords again, A, B, E, with a C# minor on the chorus.

“Yeah, okay,” Felix said and drank some more beer.

They played “Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers” by ZZ Top and “Rock and Roll” by Led Zeppelin. Felix tried to stay interested, but every time he played something different from the record Sid would stop and correct him.

“Man, you’re a hell of a guitar player, but I can’t believe you’re as good as you are and you don’t know any of these solos.”

“You guys do any Jeff Beck?” Felix asked.

Sid looked at the others. “I guess we could do ‘Shapes of Things,’ right? Like on that Gary Moore album?”

“I can fake it, I guess,” the drummer said.

“And could you maybe turn down a little?” Felix said.

“Uh, yeah, sure,” Sid said, and adjusted the knob on his guitar a quarter turn.

Felix leaned into the opening chords, pounding the Jackson, thinking about nothing but the music, putting a depth of rage and frustration into it he never knew he had. But he couldn’t sustain it; the drummer was pounding out 2-and-4, oblivious to what Felix was playing, and Sid had cranked up again and was whaling away on his Gibson with the flat of his hand.

Felix jerked his strap loose and set the guitar back in its case.

“What’s the matter?” Sid asked, the band grinding to a halt behind him.

“I just haven’t got it today,” Felix said. He wanted to break that pissant little toy Gibson across Sid’s nose, and the strength of his hatred scared him. “I’m sorry,” he said, clenching his teeth. “Maybe some other time.”

“Sure,” Sid said. “Listen, you’re really good, but you need to learn some solos, you know?”

Felix burned rubber as he pulled away, skidding through a U-turn at the end of the street. He couldn’t slow down. The car fishtailed when he rocketed out onto Rundberg and he nearly went into a light pole. Pounding the wheel with his fists, hot tears running down his face, he pushed the accelerator to the floor.

Karen was gone when Felix got home. He found a note on the refrigerator: “Sherry picked me up. Will call in a couple of days. Have a lot to think about. K.”

He set up the Princeton and tried to play what he was feeling and it came out bullshit, a jerk-off reflex blues progression that didn’t mean a thing. He leaned the guitar against the wall and went into his studio, shoving one tape after another into the decks, and every one of them sounded the same, another tired, simpleminded rehash of the obvious.

“I didn’t ask for this!” he shouted at the empty house. “You hear me? This isn’t what I asked for!”

But it was, and as soon as the words were out he knew he was lying to himself. Faster hands and a better ear weren’t enough to make him play like Beck. He had to change inside to play that way, and he wasn’t strong enough to handle it, to have every piece of music he’d ever loved turn sour, to need perfection so badly that it was easier to give it up than learn to live with the flaws.

He sat on the couch for a long time and then, finally, he picked up the guitar again. He found a clean rag and polished the body and neck and wiped each individual string. Then, when he had wiped all his fingerprints away, he put it back into the case, still holding it with the rag. He closed the latches and set it next to the amp, by the front door.

For the first time in two days he felt like he could breathe again. He turned out all the lights and opened the windows and sat down on the couch with his eyes closed. Gradually his hands became still and he could hear, very faintly, the fading music of the traffic and the crickets and the wind.

Lewis Shiner
has played drums professionally on and off since the 1960s. He’s written about music for
Crawdaddy!,
the
Village Voice,
LA Weekly,
and others. His seven novels include
Say Goodbye,
which deals with the music business, and the World Fantasy Award-winning
Glimpses.
To quote Cory Doctorow: “It’s a rare novel that can capture the raw energy of rock and roll, but
Glimpses
has this and a tense, thrilling story besides.”

“ . . . How My Heart Breaks When I Sing this Song . . . “

Lucius Shepard

The summer I turned sixteen, rock ’n’ roll came back to the fishing village of Daytona Beach for the first time since the Winnowing nearly a century before. The gypsies brought it in a horse-drawn cart, shrouded beneath a plastic tarpaulin (my cousin had a peek underneath and said it was locked in a metal coffin), and they off-loaded it inside the dancehall at the end of the wooden pier that sticks out from the Boardwalk just south of the Joyland Arcade. Then the lot of them—around thirty all told, crammed into four rickety wagons—drove up and down the beach, beating hide drums and shouting about the musical marvel they were going to put on display. My wife Darcy tells me now that not enough happened that night to make a story, and in a way she’s right; but it seems to me that it was at least the end of a story, an important one, and as such ought to be written down.

There wasn’t a prayer that Pa would have let me go to the pier. Not that he was like the Rickerds, who claimed that relics of the old days were Satan’s handiwork and praised God for having delivered us. No, Pa’s objections would have been more pragmatic. Hadn’t I gone to the Casadaga fair last month? What did I think, that the world was made of weekends? And didn’t I have nets to mend? But I wanted to go. The previous winter a peddler had come through Daytona and had played some rock ’n’ roll on a dinged-up cassette recorder. Listening to it, I had felt dangerous and edgy and full of urgent desires. I’d liked that feeling. And so just after moonrise I stole from the house to meet Darcy—then my wife-to-be—at the ruin of the Maverick Motel, which stands at the junction of AlA and a nameless street that peters out into the jungle.