Whale Music (7 page)

We recorded “Torque Torque” and “Foot on the Floor” that day. Fred Head and I worked on the tapes for about nine hours. Danny mostly slept, or listened to the baseball game on a tiny radio. The father sat in a corner and made occasional mutterings, but he knew he was outdone. Fred Head and I had a like-mindedness that the father was powerless against. (Indeed, look at me now, a replica, a clone, of Freaky Fred. I am bloated, I am uninterested in everything but noise. Fred and I even have mental problems in common, although he has outdistanced me on this count: the State still has Freaky Fred locked in a soft white room.) The father was sputtering in his slumber when Fred and I finally finished. Then Freddy handed the father a small white box containing the tape recording. The father whipped out a pen and scribbled:

and he was at Maurice Mantle’s office the next day at nine o’clock. The father dragged Danny and me along with him, even though we were supposed to be at school. On instructions from the father, Danny and I were dressed identically, pin-striped button-down collared shirts and dark trousers. Dan did his best to undermine the effect, wearing his old boots, filling his hair with grease and then letting it tumble over most of his face. My hair has always been a snivelly cringing thing, meekly lying down on top of my skull without having to be told. The father threw the tape onto a machine in Mr. Mantle’s office and said, “I think you’re going to like this, Maurice. If you don’t, you’re maybe not as smart a guy as I thought you were, and I think you probably are.” Beside Maurice Mantle the father seemed the sort of guy that would sell a sheep’s baby sister to a drunken marine. “Now, I was trying something new here. This is a new sound, you see, a whole new concept.” What the father meant was that he himself didn’t care for it, was prepared to join Mr. Mantle in denouncing the music if that’s what Maurice wanted to do. “What we got here,” the father lied, “what we got on a stick, Maurice, what we got enough to maybe fill the Grand Canyon with, is
schnooze
.” The father punched a button, the tape started rolling.

It sounded weird to me, the music trapped by the machine’s three-inch speaker. Danny was tapping his toe—mostly to draw attention to the mud on his boot—but then he started throwing up his shoulders and burying his head in his chest, a strangely rhythmic display of insecurity. “What’s that?” demanded Maurice Mantle. “Is that a dance?”

“Yeah, yeah,” said the father. “That’s the dance goes with the music.”

“That’s good,” decided Mr. Mantle. He placed elegant fingers to the knot in his tie, shoved it microscopically to the right. The father did likewise, that is, he grabbed ahold of the Jackson Pollock beavertail he had wrapped around his thick neck and made motions as though he were strangling himself.

“Why don’t we listen through those big speakers?” I asked. “It would sound better through them.”

“Probably,” agreed Maurice Mantle. “But most people don’t have big speakers, do they, Desmond? Especially kids. They have little rinky-dink pieces of shit and if music don’t sound good through them, the music just don’t sound good.”

This was the first time an adult said the word
shit
in front of me. A coming of age.

The tape finished, and the only sound in the room was the loose end hitting the controls of the machine as the flange turned. Mr. Mantle crossed over to the tape recorder, whacked at the
STOP
button. He wiggled his leg, effecting a better draping of the trouser. “What does Claire think of this?”

My mother had listened closely the first time she’d heard it, bending over so that her ear was closer to the music. She seemed bewildered for a long time, confused by the harmonies. “Angels,” she whispered. “It sounds like little angels.” Then she’d listened again, and this time she wheeled out into the middle of the room, lifting her skirts, jerking her head so violently that I feared she’d give herself whiplash.

“Claire likes it,” announced the father.

“Does she?” asked Maurice Mantle of Danny and me.

We nodded.

“Well, I guess Mantlepieces Inc. will publish the music.”

The father brought one of his fingers up into the air. Even the single finger seemed coarse, you wouldn’t care to know the places that finger had been. “We split, Moe. We go fifty-fifty on the publishing here and don’t jerk me around because you know and I know what we got here is a hit song. And let’s not be kidding ourselves or letting friendship—especially with my
wife—
get in the way of clear-headed business transactions. We go split, that’s it.”

“You want to keep some publishing for the young fellows?”

“I want to keep some publishing, Moe.”

“I’ll tell you the truth, Hank, I don’t see why I should.”

“Here’s why you should, Moe. Because I’m the guy’s gonna take this thing to the record companies. I’m the guy who’s gonna make them take it, and when we got a record, I’m the guy’s gonna take that record and shove it down the throat of every disc jockey in the country. You’re the guy’s gonna be sitting on your duff collecting money. So the deal is, we split, fifty-fifty.”

Maurice Mantle thought for a moment, then shrugged. He had to immediately shrug again, because the first shrug disarranged his lapel. “What the hell.”

They signed some contracts that morning, and what I didn’t know at the time, although I sure found out, was that the father was doing some pretty strange things. For one, he made sure that the fifty-fifty split agreement was virtually etched in stone. The father insisted on safeguards, panoplied no-escape clauses. Thus, when he fucked Maurice Mantle over sideways, it would not be viewed as any kind of chicanery, it would be seen for what it was, a vicious and bloodthirsty attack. Also, the father did some fanciful crediting. That is to say, he claimed (while Danny and I assaulted a Coke machine in the hallway—Danny could boot the contraption right in its belly, make it issue frosty bottles without swallowing a dime) that he, the father, the great unruly man, was the sole author of the words and composer of the music.

I know why the father did what he did.

Danny told me. Danny had insight into the father.

It was an act of love.

I don’t care.

I last saw the father at Danny’s funeral, the tolling of the knell. The gods attended the inhumation and were angry. Thunder rumbled, the skies boiled.

The father brought a date.

He seems much smaller now, surviving mostly on smokes and mealy rum. The father’s talent agency is not going well. He
handles a few strippers and a magician who cannot afford a live rabbit and makes do with one long-deceased.

The father wept, though. Tears burned across his face. When the rains came, the father looked up angrily, spat on the ground. The one good thing about the father is this ill-conceived defiance.

The first two or three record companies tossed us out on our butts. The father was bewildered by the lack of respect given to Henry “Hank” Howell. “Haven’t these people ever heard ‘Vivian in Velvet’?”

“You know,” said Danny, “here’s what I think it is. We come in with these songs about cars. Big, fast cars. Quality machines. But they see us drive up in this piece of junk Buick here, they figure we don’t know our asses from holes in the ground.” (Danny cottoned on to the music biz lingo pretty good.) “So we gotta get like a T-Bird, dig, a mean and nasty set of wheels. That way we command respect.”

The father gave me a little whack on the side of the head. “Why can’t you be smart like your brother?”

A Thunderbird was acquired—the father was fearless when it came to hurling himself into debt—and we cruised up to the Galaxy Records building in grand style. Not a single record executive saw us do it, mind, not even the receptionist, because the parking lot was around back.

You’ve likely seen—or at least seen a photograph of—the Galaxy building, a huge white skyscraper that looms over the
city of Los Angeles, California. They own that building thanks to me, and before they met me they were housed in a dingy low-roofed affair that looked like a vacuum-cleaner repair shop. Galaxy Records was mostly two people back then, Edgar Sexstone and his son Kenneth. The senior Sexstone was interested only in classical music, and he left everything else in the hands of his son. This could have been a mistake, because Kenny was certifiably insane. When I first met him he was sitting in a darkened office listening to a recording of rain. He had a stereo set-up that was for that time very futuristic, woofers and tweeters and all of that, and the sound was so realistic that when I entered the office I felt wet.

“Could we maybe get,” demanded the father, “a little light in here?”

“Let there be light,” said Kenny Sexstone, and in an instant the office was flooded with the stuff. “Hello, men,” said Kenny. “Talk to me. Let’s communicate. You speak, I’ll respond.” Kenneth was a scrawny little man, seeming to be no more than fifteen years of age even though he was then in his early thirties. He looked as though he’d been carved out of wood and then crudely painted, his hair blood-red and solid, his eyes two bright blue marbles. “This is a brother act?” He pointed at Danny and me. “Yin and Yang. Flip and flop. Sturm und Drang.” Kenny Sexstone next aimed his marbly eyes at the father. “Speak away, kind sir. Be my interlocutor.”

The father waved his arms grandiosely. “The Fabulous Howell Brothers.”

“The
Howl
Brothers,” said Kenny Sexstone. I’ve never known whether he misheard or extemporized.

“Desmond and Daniel Howell.”

“Des and Dan. Danny and Des.”

“The tape.” The father held aloft the flat white cardboard box. “The music.”

“The sound,” said Kenny Sexstone. “The feeling.” He threw the tape on to a huge machine and levered it into motion.
“Torque Torque” fell out of the huge speakers. It filled the room like a bad smell. I now longed for Maurice Mantle’s tiny three-inchers, because Kenny Sexstone’s monsters amplified every imperfection. Every time my harmonies fell off pitch—singing in the studio is a knack that takes time to acquire—it stung and made me feel ill. Kenny Sexstone winced as though someone were banging him over the head with a ball-peen. I didn’t know then that Kenneth was saddled with perfect pitch, a sense of hearing so acute that he could tell an A 441 from an A 440. Still, Kenny was grinning at the end of the tune, and he smashed the
STOP
button and said, “Automotive imagery. The way to go. The kids have wheels. Genius at work here.”

“Yeah, well.” The father shrugged modestly.

“Danny and Des, the Howl Brothers.” Kenny Sexstone started up the tape recorder, we all listened to “Foot on the Floor”. It was again very painful for Kenneth, but at the end he was happy as could be. “Yes, yes. I’ll get contracts. Name-in-blood type of thing. I’ll sign you for eternity.”

“I produce them,” said the father. “That’s got to be part of the deal.”

“You produce?”

“I produced this, didn’t I?”

“And,” said Danny—
Danny?
Both the father and I turned to look at him—“and another thing is, we work with this engineer guy, Fred Head.”

Kenneth Sexstone waved his hand dismissively. “Engineers are plebs, my son. Easily shanghaied.”

“Yeah, well,
Kenny
, we only work with Fred Head. Right, Des?”

“Hey,” said the father, “engineers are engineers.”

“Des?” said Danny quietly.

“I would prefer to work with Mr. Head,” I mumbled.

“Enough!” shouted Kenneth Sexstone. “No cause for inconsonance. Mr. Head shall be retained. Now.” He rose from
behind his desk in jerky little hops like a marionette. “It’s tranquillity time.”

“Aw, jeez,” said the father, “I got things to do.”

“Tranquillity time,” Kenneth Sexstone repeated, unimpressed by the father’s claims of business. He took a tape, put it on to his huge machine. “Desmond. Hit the lights.”

I was off and moving before I’d fully realized what it was Mr. Sexstone wanted me to do. It certainly didn’t take the two of us long to establish our relationship. I banged at the wall switch, plunged the four of us into blackness.

“Listen,” whispered Kenneth.

A sound issued forth, the strangest sound I’ve ever heard, a howling from the dark side of the moon.

“Sperms,” whispered Kenneth Sexstone.

Amidst inexplicable beepings, aquatic and metallic echoes, came another ululation, as sad as a sunken ship.

“Humpbacks,” whispered Sexstone.

“Jeez, I really got to go.” I knew that even in the darkness the father was glancing at his wristwatch.

“It sounds kind of like a constipated elephant,” remarked Daniel.

Another sound, this one so low it rumbled in my loins and bristled my pubic hairs and will-nots.

“What
is
this?” I asked.

“Whale music,” said Kenneth Sexstone.

Shall we play the game for Kenny? The game of best placement in the space-time continuum, seeing as none of us belongs here? Okay, okay, but here’s the kicker: what we need for Kenneth is a whole other planet! One with, oh, chrome pleasure-bots. A planet where food doesn’t exist, everyone survives on a regimen of megavitamins and liquid californium. A planet where popular entertainment involves sticking electrodes into the fat of the brain. Yes, Kenneth should live in such a place. For one thing, he’d like it. For another, it would get him far away from me!