Touch (1987) (3 page)

"The waiting list--what if you're in bad shape?"

"They're all in bad shape," the black girl said. "But we're full up, hundred and thirty-seven as of today."

"How about, do you take women?"

"Yeah, there some women. Some young girls even."

"Is that right? How long's the wait?"

"About three or four weeks. Unless somebody comes and they're desperate, I mean really in bad shape," the black girl said. "We don't turn people away, anything like that."

"I hope not," Bill Hill said.

Was he learning anything? Maybe. He was tired of waiting around. What he felt like right now was a drink.

He stopped off at the Athens Bar in Greektown and called Lynn Faulkner. The phone rang seven times. When she answered, Bill Hill said, "You know something, this is the first time I haven't had to talk to that recording. You know what it's like talking to somebody that isn't there?"

"Say it," Lynn Faulkner said, "I'm in the tub. I wasn't even gonna answer."

"You got a phone in there with you?"

"Listen, you want to call me back? I'm afraid I'm gonna get electrocuted."

"Get dressed and I'll take you out to dinner."

"Can't do it. I just got finished with Artie and a bunch of shitheads from L.A. and I'm not putting shoes on for anybody."

"Well, you're gonna have a couple, aren't you? Help you relax?"

"How come those guys in the business, no matter where they're from they all sound like they're from New York?"

"What guys?"

"You can bring some Asti Spumante if you want," Lynn said. "Cold, okay?"

"Now you're talking," Bill Hill said. "I got something interesting to tell you about. In fact, listen, it could even change your life."

Bill Hill thought he was kidding.

Chapter
3

LYNN MARIE FAULKNER left Uni-Faith in 1968, a few months before Bill Hill moved the 117-foot cross of Jesus from Dalton, Georgia, to Flat Rock, Michigan. Lynn didn't think too much of living up north. Burrr, she said, too cold for a Miami girl. Lynn had a lot of cute ways about her then.

The reason she left Uni-Faith though, age nineteen and at the peak of her baton-twirling career, was to marry Doug "Whiz" Whaley, veteran saddle bronc rider with the Longhorn World Championship Rodeo. It was funny that when she finally divorced Doug last year--1976 being a year she would always remember--the rodeo was in Michigan, performing at the Pontiac Silverdome.

Doug Whaley, one-time saddle bronc rider turned calf roper, should have known the day would come. All he said, stepping into the Li'l Hobo travel trailer 2:30 in the afternoon and seeing no dishes and bread on the table, was, "Where's my dinner? You know I'm competing tonight."

He should have looked at his little girl first and tried softer words to get his chuck on the table. Instead, he walked into it dumb arrogant, head fuzzed with booze, and his peevish tone set off the charge.

Lynn said, "That's all, buddy. You get the trailer and I take the car. That's the division of property, and if you don't like it come by Oakland County Circuit Court for the hearing. You can listen while I tell the judge what a first-prize asshole you've been eight out of the past eight and a half years.

Lynn already had a lawyer and the prospect of a job in the music business; so she decided to stay around and get a no-fault Michigan divorce. Once she'd made up her mind, there was no reason to change it or feel guilty. The situation was clear-cut.

Doug drank and he fooled around, not saving a whole lot for Lynn. He sat a horse and could look at a young girl and make her shiver. But behind that rawhide hell-rider image was usually a half-drunk, stove-up Absorbine Junior freak. Whiz the fiz in the sack, all talk and no action. Doug could take his limp pecker and his Li'l Hobo trailer and see if he could connect them up somewhere else; Lynn was through.

A lot of little things broke down their so-so marriage, nearly all under the heading of Doug's immaturity. While Doug was looking at himself in back-bar mirrors, Lynn was growing up. She read all the time: back issues of National Geographic, popular novels, Ms, Viva, WWD, Rolling Stone, books on self-improvement--how to free yourself of guilt, fear, resentments and find the real you--and, by some lucky turn, The Portable Dorothy Parker, the pages becoming limp and dog-eared as she learned, with relief, it was all right to laugh at most serious things. She found out she was a pretty bright girl besides having a nice nose and a perky little behind, way smarter than Doug and too alive and eager to be his Dale Evans. Lynn had to get out while she still had a future.

A PR man at the Pontiac Silverdome, a really nice guy, got her a job in the advertising department of Creem, "America's Only Rock 'n' Roll Magazine," located above some storefronts in Birmingham--a swanky little Detroit suburb--and not like any business offices she had ever seen or heard of, with people walking around barefoot in cutoffs and tank tops. It was fun being in the world of commerce and rock and roll. Lynn sold KMA Records on a third-cover, four-color, twelve-insertions deal, and KMA hired her away from Creem as their Detroit-office publicist and record plugger at seventeen five a year plus a car and expenses. She called up her old buddy and former boss, Bill Hill, told him about it, and said, "Hey, not bad for a little Uni-Faith baton twirler who didn't know her ass from a hymnbook. Neat, huh?" Bill Hill said, "Not bad at all, honey. It's nearly as much as I make and I'm old enough to be your uncle."

That was nine months ago, when Lynn Whaley first got the job with KMA Records out of L.A. and was using her maiden name again, Lynn Faulkner, without the Marie.

Seventeen five plus a car and expenses, it sounded great. Except there was no KMA Detroit office. She'd have to work out of her own place, with an answering service or message recorder.

Well, that was all right. Maybe even better. She got an apartment in Somerset--a suburban complex with swimming pools, tennis courts, and a golf course, supposedly full of swinging singles--two bedrooms and a balcony overlooking the ninth fairway for three ninety a month, half of which she could write off as a business expense.

The car was a dull green Chevy Nova they must have bought second-hand from the post office. Lynn had to buy an AM-FM radio out of her twenty-cents-a-mile allowance.

Lynn said to Artie Rapp, the KMA publicity director in from L.A., "I'm supposed to take DJs out in that turd?"

Artie Rapp said, "Take them where? To your place? They have cars. All you got to do is see that KMA releases are played on the air. Check Peaches, Harmony House, Korvettes, see that KMA releases get good display and're selling. Meet the different KMA artists when they come to the Motor City, get them interviewed and fixed up and all, and do a little advance work on concerts and special promotions. What do you need for that, a Rolls Silver Cloud?"

"What do you mean 'fixed up and all'?"

"Sources. A band comes to town, say the Nightstalkers," Artie Rapp said, "they got their roadies, their groupies, all that. But say they want some good Colombian. That's all I'm talking about. Or they need some equipment or where's the best ribs in town--shit like that, nothing big. A group's in town you spend a little extra time with them. Otherwise you're what, twenty-seven hundred miles from the home office working out of your own pad with a generous expense account. You know how many people in the business would trade places with you?"

"How many?" Lynn said.

"I'll tell you what. There any good places to eat in this town I'll treat you to a nice dinner," Artie Rapp said, with his feet on Lynn's glass coffee table. "But since we're here--huh?--and we're gonna be working together . . ."

Lynn could handle Artie and she got along fine with people in the business, the station music directors and DJs, because she came on straight and didn't waste time giving them a lot of shuck and jive to get a KMA release on their play lists. If she really liked the record she might hustle it with a little extra effort, but without ever getting hyper about it. Any payola arrangements, if they were made, were left to Artie. Lynn kept her nose clean, offered no inducements, and was not sleeping with any of the local DJs. At twenty-nine going on thirty she was older than most of the rock and roll DJs in town, but didn't seem to turn any of them off, not even in this youth-oriented business. Lynn had a neat nose, bedroom eyes, and a slim little figure.

She wore her blond hair layered back and feathered fairly short, pasted on twenty-dollar eyelashes, rubbed in a cheek gloss for that natural look, and painted her nails light brown. Artie told her she had a killer body, wishing he could see it in person beneath the hip-huggers and India cotton shirt. He'd demonstrate that she was just the right size. See, at five eight he was the average height of the American fighting man in World War II and his mouth, look, was just even with Lynn's nose when she had her clogs on. Artie maneuvered for nine months and never made it.

DJs who wanted to get it on with Lynn would give her a sleepy look in a hang-out bar and say, "You want to get it on?"

Lynn might say, "I better tell you, I'm a very religious person basically and when I do it I have to be in love or it just doesn't work. I guess it's the way I was brought up."

If the DJ pressed and said, "So let's fall in love," Lynn would say, "You know where it is? It's in the grooves. That's the bottom line. If my record's any good you'll play it and it'll sell and my balling you won't make the least bit of difference, will it?"

The guys in the business found out the platter-chatter hip approach wasn't going to make it with Lynn. She was a very laid-back young lady, not some trendy little chick who was easily impressed. Though she did have her weak moments.

Lynn had an affair with a TV news man until his hairdo, which was like a brownish-gray helmet, finally unnerved her. They would smoke grass and thrash around in bed half the afternoon and the guy would come out of it with every hair still glued in place for his six o'clock newscast. Lynn felt either she couldn't bring out the real person beneath the hard charm or there was none there to begin with.

She had an affair with a married station manager who was real. He'd stop by her apartment Monday and Thursday evenings and tell her about the crises at work and his tragic situation at home, married to an alcoholic. Lynn thought she liked him pretty much; but after a few weeks of listening to his troubles as he got half smashed and then going through a speedy routine in bed, she decided that real didn't necessarily mean interesting. What the guy needed was a mother or a psychiatrist.

Was she happy as a record promoter?

Well, she had this suburban apartment and a telephone extension cord that reached from the second-bedroom office all the way out to the balcony overlooking the golf course. She had a lot of crushed velvet and chrome and a six-by-six-foot blowup of Waylon Jennings's outlaw face over the couch (he wasn't even a KMA artist, he was RCA). And Artie had raised her after six months to twenty grand a year.

She did wish she represented more black funk--and maybe a little country on the R and B side, not the heartache country or the green-hills-down-home country--instead of all the punk rock KMA was putting out.

She wished she didn't have to smile so much. Being nice in business when you didn't feel like it made your face ache, not to mention being a terrible pain in the ass.

And she could easily pass on all the waiting around when KMA artists came in to do concerts.

First, they very seldom arrived when they were supposed to--especially the rockers, who had absolutely no sense of time--and she'd spend hours at Detroit Metro waiting for flights.

Then more waiting in motel suites, lobbies, waiting backstage in a squeeze of groupies and roadies, tripping over power cables, being ignored by the managers and reps, waiting for a door to open and stoned musicians to come out---

Yes, but how many ex-baton twirlers with only high school, two seasons with a religious revival show, and a nine-year hitch in a rodeo trailer made twenty grand a year and expenses?

Maybe not any. But maybe because that's the way ex-baton twirlers were. They couldn't stand waiting around for something to happen.

Chapter
4

"EVERYBODY'S SO SERIOUS AND UPTIGHT," Lynn said, "like somebody in the next room's dying or having a baby and, Christ, all they're doing is representing a rock and roll band. I kept thinking, what am I doing here?"

"Making money," Bill Hill said. He stood by the sliding screen door to the balcony, looking out at the ninth fairway, empty, everybody probably in having their supper. "You know what my view is? The parking area out back of the building. How much you pay, about four hundred?"

"Three ninety." Lynn, on the couch, had her telephone on the glass coffee table next to the $4.99 bottle of Asti Spumante Bill Hill had brought. Lynn liked the $7.99 one better, but would probably be going back to Gallo white before too long.

"See, I could tell myself I was where I wanted to be. I could, you know, rationalize. But my stomach kept giving me signals. What're you doing here? Get out. Leave."

"Your stomach," Bill Hill said.

"My gut reaction, with all the hotshots, the agents, the road managers--they walk in a place, they take over. I'm the one set up the hospitality suite. I got the Heinekens, the vodka and mix, scotch, a nice cheese tray--"