This Is How It Really Sounds (10 page)

“One second,” Ernie said. He stopped beside the formidable bronze lions of the old Hongkong Bank and fumbled with his camera. He aimed it into the distance, muttering something about the focus, when there, in a sight so strange and wonderful that Peter Harrington thought at first it was a hallucination, there was the unmistakable head of curly blond hair, the famous face, the entourage of Chinese onlookers soaking him into their cell phone cameras. Closer, until there could be no doubt about who it was, nonsensical on the Shanghai sidewalk. He was approaching, his expression intense and focused solely on Peter, as if he somehow remembered him from that bar in New York all those years ago and realized that they were both rock stars after all. Straight toward him, as if his other life had finally arrived: it was Pete Harrington.

 

III

Kickin' It with The Man

 

1

The House at Wilksbury

The bus had
broken down somewhere outside Wilksbury, Pennsylvania, after a gig in Cleveland. Pete Harrington remembered that because, when he was a teenager, his grandfather had told him that as a young man drifting through Wilksbury he'd met the most beautiful girl he'd ever seen, and that if he'd had half a chance to win her, he would have stayed on there the rest of his life. That was 1932, and a pretty girl didn't have much interest in a twenty-year-old hobo offering to do chores for food. Pete never understood why the old man was still telling the story fifty years later: he thought maybe Gramps had run out of things to talk about. Then, between a gig in Cleveland and another in Philadelphia, he'd been drifting off to sleep when he saw a green highway sign for Wilksbury, and he remembered his grandfather and the girl. The next thing he knew he woke up and the bus was silent and stationary. Everyone else in the band was sleeping.

The gas station sat far from the highway. An old one, with white clapboard sheathing and a solid wooden garage door that swung up on springs. Christmas-tree air fresheners in little packets. A glass-doored vending machine with pale white-bread sandwiches in it. It had nothing interesting about it, but at the same time its antiquated presence buzzed with mysterious lives whose contours he could almost imagine.

It was five
A.M.
They were wrapping up the
Wreckage
tour, so it must have been autumn. It had been raining around there; it seemed like it would start raining again any minute. Behind them, the highway cars were hissing into the bleached-out dawn sky, and big trucks groaned and gunned their engines to climb the grade, bouncing their machine voices off the rock cuts.

The owner of the station had just arrived wearing a pair of blue coveralls with a little white oval on the breast that said
LES
, and he dumped some coffee into a frilly filter and set it gurgling. Les and the driver and Bobby talked over how long it would take to get parts from Pittsburgh, and could he find them transportation to Charleston? Pete wandered away to the edge of the parking lot to take a leak and looked out over the fields that floated through the mist down below him. A red barn sat at the bottom of the slope, and, far off on the other side, he could see a farmhouse with a wide porch and a tree in the front yard. For some reason he thought about Gramps again and his half-century-old story about the house and the girl, and he realized that this must be that house. He scrambled down through the litter and the wet bushes to check it out.

The barn was open at the sides, and there were big yellow leaves hanging all around from the rafters, which he realized, to his amazement, was tobacco. Bales of hay formed a little fortress in one corner; some had been broken down into a big soft pile that smelled so sweet and grassy that it went to his head, the best thing he'd ever smelled. He saw a pitchfork, a tractor attachment of some sort. There was a faint odor of diesel and lubricants. He was startled when something moved. Then he heard the snuffling and dense breathing of a horse. He felt uneasy all of a sudden, and he stepped out again, into the field.

The house sat some two hundred yards away from him, and he could see that a light was on in one corner of the ground floor, probably the kitchen. Someone was making breakfast; he was sure of that. Supermarket coffee percolating on the stove in an aluminum pot. There'd be oatmeal. Bacon. Three fried eggs, like the “truckers' breakfast” in the truck stop, except this was the “home” of all the promised “home cooking” at every highway restaurant he'd ever been to. Who lived there, at home? He dreamed a middle-aged couple, maybe with a few kids. The mother was the first one up, with an apron on, presiding over the salty smell of morning. Maybe they had a daughter, a beautiful eighteen-year-old daughter, the most beautiful girl in western Pennsylvania, fairy-tale beautiful. He'd knock on their door, and they'd open it and look him over. He'd say,
Hi, I'm Pete Harrington and my bus broke down on the highway out there.
They'd invite him in and offer him something to eat, not knowing who he was, and the beautiful daughter would come downstairs to stare at him and he'd stay around for a few days in the guest room, doing some chores around the place, helping in the fields, chopping wood, and before he knew it, it would be home, and she'd be his, and they'd be living this gorgeous green life of hot black coffee and waking up on autumn mornings in a world that was antique and crisp and uncluttered and luminous. That whole life transpired in a moment as he stood there, from lying naked with his new wife to walking with his grandchildren, just a feeling, but so strong and possible that he felt he could make it real, just by reaching out and touching it.

He made a few steps toward the house. The field was filled with stubble, and he could feel the cold dew soaking through his velvet tennis shoes. The earth was soft and rich. The rectangle of light on the other side of the mist seemed to pulse almost imperceptibly.

Pete! Where the hell are you going? Get your stoned ass up here!

Bobby's voice. He turned around and his manager was up at the top of the slope, at the edge of the gas station parking lot. Duffy and Cody were standing next to him and they probably thought he was still spaced from the mushrooms. Maybe he was. He turned and looked at the farmhouse again, the window with light in it, the dark ones where people were still sleeping. His other home. Cody:
Come back up here before you get shot, man! We can't find another lead singer!
The others yelled, too. He stopped and let their voices wash over his shoulders. The farmhouse was vibrating there, across the field.

He'd never reach it. His life had caught up with him, with its newspapers and its clothes all his size. He'd never reach it and he'd never be able to explain it and he tried writing a song about it afterward that never came out right, no matter how many words he added and subtracted. The song was about the house near Wilksbury, and the girl he never saw, but if it was the story of that girl, how could it not be the story of that gas station and the barn and the night before and the mushrooms they'd eaten? The rain in that place that had just turned to mist, but not the rain of the other place that they had left behind, the light in the window, the little cloud of darkness beneath the tree, the horse snorting, the grass breaking, the old man dreaming of a life he'd never lived, the trucker passing northbound on the turnpike strung with towns reaching for his thermos, thinking
Six hundred miles
.
Six hundred miles. Six hundred miles …
The best ones always got away.

 

2

Thanks for Your Support

The problem,
he thought, was that you only had one life, when really you needed three or four. You should be able to say, okay, boss: done being me! Ready to be, say, the president, or maybe this guy in the liquor ad sailing out into space on a couple strips of fiberglass. That looked insane! Hanging with the snow bunny by the roaring fire, sipping a … what was it … Hennessy cognac? A gig he could handle!

He sensed the waitress beside him with the tray and he draped the copy of
Vanity Fair
over his laptop. He hadn't gotten any songs written, but he'd probably work better after breakfast, with better blood sugar. It was only eleven, and he had plenty of time.

“Here you go, Pete. One ‘Healthy Choices Breakfast.' One double vodka and mango juice.” She said it without irony: she'd been on the scene that long. Pete Harrington looked up at her over his red-tinted reading glasses and smiled. “Thank you, gorgeous.” He remembered her bartending at the Whisky twenty years ago, when she was young and hot, and, though he couldn't place it exactly, it seemed like he'd fucked her in a closet during one of his gigs there, unless that was some other blond chick. He always wondered about it when he saw her in here, but he hadn't figured out a good way to ask. She's still not bad: a tad heavier at the waist, but a nice rack to make up for it. Face a little harder, but he'd come to like that in a woman. Live this life, and your face damn well better be a little harder, or you haven't learned a thing.

Reading the fan mail that came in through his Web site. On a good day he'd get twenty letters, anything from fortysomething women sending naked pictures of themselves to hard-core fans asking about the drum kit used on the East Coast leg of the
Wreckage
tour, after Cory fucking offed himself by drinking a bottle of 151 in one gulp. Sometimes he got letters from China; he could always tell by the bad English and the little chicken tracks along the bottom of the page. Bobby said they still remembered him from that whole crazy tour in 1992, but it was all pirated, so who cared? Some letters asked prying personal questions.
How many women have you slept with, Pete? When was your first sexual experience?
Yeah, like I'd tell you. A lot of them were still cheering him on about the thing that happened with the bassist from Uncle Sam's Erection. He had an antenna for the losers, the ones who were way too into him. Others looked like pretty well-balanced people who just liked his music. “When's your next release coming out?” Or, better, “I saw you in Detroit on your last tour, and, man, you've still got it!” He usually didn't answer them himself: Bobby said it lessened his mystique, but once in a while, when someone sent something that really made him feel good, like someone who said they really liked one of his later albums, or maybe if the woman in the picture looked young and pretty, he'd send a short little reply, like, “Thanks for your support. Keep rockin! Pete.”

He looked down at the oatmeal and the packet of green tea beside the mug, then took a long sip of the cocktail. Fifteen minutes to eat breakfast, then he'd get to work. The tour was in three or four months, so he had to write the songs, get a band together, and nail them down, not to mention rehearsing his classics, which is what everybody came to hear, anyway. Bobby'd been pretty clear about that fact, over and over.
They want to hear the hits, Pete. You captured that moment for them, and only you can bring it back.

He mixed some diced dried fruit into his oatmeal, then dumped some brown sugar and cream over it. Healthy fucking choices. He gulped down the rest of the cocktail.

The tour. So far it was Old Nevada Silver Days, in Elko, followed, probably, by a week at a Harrah's. The Harrah's in Reno, not Vegas, but Bobby claimed it was a foot in the door to Vegas. After that the Fresno Harvest Festival, and then the convention center in Anchorage, Alaska, which Bobby claimed was becoming the next Pacific Northwest underground scene. “It's like Seattle just before Nirvana broke,” Bobby said. “Believe me: you want these people to hear your new songs.” He'd played Anchorage before: he wasn't seeing Nirvana there.

He turned the page past the skier. It was a perfume ad, which meant that it was more or less a lingerie ad and an evening-dress ad. The black-haired woman, probably Chinese, in soft-focus gazing out at him from the seat of a limousine, a white sleeve with a cuff link resting on her bare thigh, where her cocktail dress had gotten mysteriously hitched up. What was the message here?
Buy this perfume and you will be sexy. Sexy and elegant. So sexy and elegant and in-control that millionaires will feel you up in their expensive cars. And what could be better than that?
He'd screwed this model, hadn't he? During the
Looking for the eXit
tour? The DreamKrushers had just hit the cover of
Rolling Stone
and she'd spotted him at a party in New York. Stalked him like a game animal. They ended up in his room, and in the half-light after she'd done everything he asked, she'd looked up at him, in that same soft focus, with the same look.

Crap, that was twenty years ago. That woman was probably this model's mother. And now he was just another sucker, like millions of others who saw the ad, plugging himself into someone else's story. He might as well be out there in America somewhere—sitting in a strip mall beauty salon in Fargo or walking into some hardware store in Alaska wearing oily coveralls—see this picture on the counter, and think, “This is the woman I should have had, not fucking
Maybelle
!” And there'd be some proprietor type behind the counter named Luke or Jimmy or Arnie, saying, like,
We've got a special on reversible screwdrivers, Harry!
And Harry'd just be, like,
I wonder if I can shoot myself six times in the head?

He could feel the glimmer of a song. A sort of Mellencamp anthem about small-town America, their faded dreams, the unpretentious value of their simple lives that they can't recognize because they're longing for something in a magazine. He picked up the pen and paper he always kept with him and jotted,
Staring at a model in the hardware store, she's looking right at him, she's asking for more … You were supposed to be mine, not this faded time …
Something, something, something,
Vanity Fair.
Because it was, like, people's vanity that stood between them and happiness, and the media stoked that vanity and kept it just out of reach at the same time.