Daron's Guitar Chronicles
Volume 1
A story of rock and roll, coming out, and coming of age in the 1980s
by Cecilia Tan
Daron's Guitar Chronicles
Copyright © 2010 by Cecilia Tan
All Rights Reserved
Contents of this ebook were serialized online at Daron's Guitar Chronicles (http://daron.ceciliatan.com) between November 2009 and February 2010. There may be slight variations in the text from the serialized version and the ebook version.
No reproduction without permission.
daron.ceciliatan.com
Smashwords Edition
This electronic version was prepared by the author using OpenOffice and was converted to the ebook format through the Smashwords Meatgrinder.
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Table of Contents
PART ONE: Summer 1986
4. Always Something There to Remind Me
6. Jet Airliner
7. I Love L.A.
10. I Ran
11. I Fought the Law (And the Law Won)
14. Heart of Glass
15. One Thing Leads to Another
18. Moody Blues
19. The Logical Song
21. That's What Friends Are For
23. The Cure
PART TWO: December 1986
31. You Got Another Thing Coming
32. Goody Two Shoes
34. Let's Dance
36. Everybody Wants to Rule the World
37. Unguarded Minute
39. You're All I've Got Tonight
More Daron's Guitar Chronicles
Part One
Summer 1986
I Love Rock and Roll
After soundcheck me and Tollman and Doug smoked a little weed in the back room. That is, they smoked and I faked it. Tollman handed me the joint, and I cupped it and did what I thought was a pretty convincing inhaling act. Tollman wasted his toke talking mile-a-minute like always, but that was Tollman for you.
“... should be a hoppin’ crowd tonight, boy, you see all them hogs out there?” he said. His stringy blond bangs hung over his eyes and you could never tell where he was looking. Tollman was a head case. He grew up in Providence, went to the Quaker prep school over the hill, did maybe a couple of years of college. Now, Mr. Alexander Tollman did everything anti-preppie, like calling motorcycles “hogs” and singing in a metal band. “They all out there with them hogbitch girlfriends on the back,” he was saying. Jeez.
Doug took a deep drag and nodded while he held his smoke. I pretended to.
“You ready?” Tollman said, pointing at me with the joint before pinching it up to his lips.
I nodded some more. As long as I kept thinking I was relaxed and that everything was going smoothly, then it probably was. Not like this was a difficult gig, two twelve song sets of cover songs and some originals that sounded just like them. One night only, cash under the table. I’d told them I’d do it this afternoon when Tollman had stopped by the Aquarium to pick up some demo tapes.
That’s why I wasn’t toking with the guys. Weed sometimes flips me into this kind of paranoid nothing-is-right headspace. And that was something I didn't want tonight, easy gig or no.
I passed the roach to Doug, slid off the stack of beer cases I was sitting on, and my feet hit the ground kind of hard.
“Hey, where you going?” Tollman.
I made a tuning peg twist with my empty fingers.
“We got to get you dressed, cowboy.” With his eyes curtained behind his hair, his smile was wicked.
“Right now?”
“Come on.” He looked me up and down. I was in my usual clothes—canvas hi-tops, blue jeans, plain black t-shirt. My denim jacket was tied by the arms around my waist.
“What size feet ya got?”
“Nine?” I hedged.
“Doug, you a nine?”
Doug, who was considerably taller and heftier than either Tollman or me, held up his hands and laughed. “Try eleven and a half.”
“Shit. Here, try these on.” Tollman dug a pair of short, flat-heeled black boots out of his gym bag and held them out to me. I took them. Up close, Tollman had wrinkles around his mouth and eyes. He acted twenty five, but I was pretty sure we were talking more like forty. Scary, to think that he was twice my age and still playing Van Halen and AC/DC covers in places like this. The other reason I thought him older was his wife picked him up at the Aquarium the other day in a stationwagon--two almost-teen type kids in the backseat. Okay, he could be like thirty two, if he'd spawned when he was like twenty. I didn’t know and I didn’t want to know.
I put the boots on. They fit, and didn’t even look that bad.
“Dunno, Alex. Kinda new wave-y,” Doug said, his face tilted like he was trying to look at the boots without actually looking at them.
“They’re better than what he had on,” Tollman put in. “And what’s new wave-y about them?”
“Aren’t those the boots you used to wear in--”
“What else do you think he needs?” Tollman tapped his own booted foot on the floor and talked extra loud in an obvious attempt to change the subject. He’d gotten dressed before sound check and was already in skin tight spandex with a leopard print vest. “The jeans and shirt are kinda dumpy.”
“Jeans look okay tucked into the boots,” Doug said, “even if the boots are a little... Huey Lewis.”
“Look,” Tollman said to me. “Just keep the boots. I never wear 'em anymore.” He had buckskin color suede ones on now, with a pointy toe and a bit of a heel that clicked when he walked. “Take off your shirt.” He rummaged in the bag and pulled out something that looked like a loose butterfly net.
I hadn’t moved.
“Go on, try it.”
I pulled my shirt off and accepted the net. When I held it up I could make out arm holes. It was some kind of string vest and when it was drawn tight it made me look like I’d played cat’s cradle in a tornado.
“Jeez, Tollman, he’s as skinny as you.”
“Well, he’ll fit right in.”
I hoped the dim backroom bulb hid my blushing. There was, shall we say, something intensely uncomfortable about about standing there with them staring at me.
“I still say the jeans are faggy,” Tollman said and I felt a lump in my throat. What was I going to say?
Doug snorted. “You gonna lend him some spandex, too? Or maybe just a sock?”
We all laughed at that--if it hadn’t been about me I might have even thought it was funny. Somewhere in my brain I was trying to come up a witty comeback but all I could really think was: jeezus but heavy metal guys have the weirdest sense of what’s "faggy" and what’s not.
Tollman had his hand on his chin, like that helped him think. Then his hand migrated up his face and held his hair on the top of his head, which probably did help him see. “I don’t know.”
Doug yawned. “Jeezus, Tollman, it’s just for one night. You won’t even see half of him behind the guitar.”
“All right. Fine.” He rummaged in his bag again. “Now for makeup.” He held up a handful of round plastic tubes.
Doug gave me a slap on the back with his meaty bass-player hand. I must have looked sort of ill because he said, “Don’t worry, it don’t hurt.”
There was a mirror in the men's room and they marched me to it like I was going to the gallows.
Invisible Touch
I always thought that eye makeup would be as garish and obvious to the wearer as it was to an onlooker—like horn-rimmed glasses or mirror shades or something. I was wrong; once the mascara and eyeliner and eyebrow pencil and whatever else were on, I forgot about them. Which meant that I got a mild shock every time I glimpsed my cats-cradled self in the men’s room mirror. My hair wasn’t long enough for head-banging and not the slightest bit wavy, so Tollman had slicked it back with some sort of goop. He’d tied a brightly colored scarf to each of my upper arms, too. I may be scrawny but if there's one thing playing a lot of guitar gives you it's biceps.
I tried to be invisible as I searched along the back of the stage in the dim lights for a good place to tape a set list for myself. The crowd was out there, drinking, smoking, laughing, on the other side of a chain link fence that separated stage from dance floor. The club was called “The Cage” and I felt like a circus animal up there, dressed in orange and fluorescent pink, getting ready to play a gig with a band with the fucked-up-edly spelled name of Tygerz Claw. (I think the theory was that if it worked for Def Leppard, and Led Zeppelin before them, it could work for these guys, but I didn’t ask.) The Cage was a far cry from the home town bar where I’d played as a kid; in fact I’d call it downright scuzzy. They had Metal Night every Thursday, and Doors and Zep cover bands on weekends, and punk all-ages shows on Sunday afternoons, and for a town like Providence--which had a lot of local music and some legendary great clubs--the Cage was about as low as it got prestige-wise.
All of which I was trying hard not to think about, and which I would forget as soon as we started to play. I taped down my set list and took a quick look at my guitar in the stand, a Korean-made Fender Strat that had been mine since Jersey. It was the kind of guitar a teenager could afford by working after school at a dinky suburban music store, trading work for equipment and lessons because there was no one else around to teach him and because he wanted to spend as little time at home as possible. I resisted the urge to pick the guitar up and play a little, just to make sure everything was working right. The clock on the wall, caged in its own round mesh like the clocks on school basketball courts, said it was 8:35.
The set times were listed as 9pm and 11pm but of course the management wouldn’t let us on until ten, on the universal night-club theory that people would drink more while waiting around. I stood off to the side of the stage while fully-clothed bouncers and stage crew type guys, with heavy bundles of keys hung from their belts, went up there from time to time with self-important strides. I wished I was wearing a shirt and jeans. I wished I had something to do to kill the time. I didn’t want to approach the bar for a beer and risk getting asked for I.D. They didn’t know me in here and the bartenders didn’t know I was in the band. That left me with two options—stand out here in the jukebox noise shuffling my feet, or sit in the backroom with the guys more. I’d never learned to smoke (cigarettes, that is) and vaguely wished I’d brought my other guitar, my school guitar, an $800 Yamaha classical with rosewood fretboard and faux ivory pegs, to play. (I’d have to be crazy to bring it to a place like this, though.)
I decided standing around brooding about what to do other than stand around was another easy way to get sucked into a downward spiral, so I went back to the guys. Dave, the guitar player who’d broken his hand and who I was replacing tonight, had arrived and was regaling the others with the story of a motorcycle accident. From what he was saying this wasn’t the accident that hurt his hand but was from a couple of years ago. He waved a Rolling Rock in the hand that had no cast. Dave wasn’t gigging tonight but he was dressed like he could have been, a scarf around his hair, artfully ripped jeans over colorful tights, a red tank top cut down the sides. Ron, the drummer, was tapping his sticks on his thighs like he was playing along to a Walkman, though he wasn’t wearing one. The song coming from the overtaxed PA system in the club was Quiet Riot “Cum On Feel the Noize” (fucked up spelling not being limited to band names) and I could see that wasn’t what Ron was playing. Dave and Doug got talking about some other people they knew, and Tollman wanted to know how Dave’s brother was doing in the machine shop where he worked, and so on and so forth. I was pretty used to sitting around with a bunch of people a lot older than me, listening to them talk, I guess. I sat there, occasionally laughing in the right places, while the other three shot the shit, Ron counted out time on his leg and we all waited for ten o’clock to roll around.
Later, I would stand at the sink wondering what to do about the mess all the inevitable head thrashing and sweat had made of my hair. By halfway through the second song the arrangement of goop disintegrated, leaving my hair hanging in pointy, wet-looking strands all around my head that poked me once the stuff dried. I would stand there at the mirror and debate the merits of running my wet hands through it or just dunking my head into the sink. Add to this the fact that as we we’d come off stage I’d made a terrible mistake: rubbing the sweat out of my eye with the back of my hand and, not knowing better, giving myself a raccoon eye. This would all happen before midnight. The set itself was fine.
Another Lost Classic
I was just wadding up a piece of toilet paper and wiping it under my eye when the door to the men’s room opened, bringing a blast of club/bar noise with it: jukebox pumped through the PA, bottles clinking, people talking in that rowdy bar way. The wad of paper came away from my skin horrifyingly sooty-looking. Sigh. Despite having played a pretty fucking good set, actually, and having abstained from drugs, I was feeling pretty low at that moment, tired, unsure why I was there, exactly the mindset I’d been trying to avoid. Fuck that, I was telling myself. Don’t be so fucking serious all the time. It was a ripping fun stupid wild set, full of gut-punching guitar solos like nobody writes anymore, and bikers’ girfriends danced on the floor with plastic cups of beer in their hands while the bikers themselves nodded their heads with the riffs. It was the most fun I'd had in weeks. What’s wrong with that?
That’s what I was thinking when I looked up and saw who had come into the restroom. Two guys, one was Dave, who had to put his beer down before he could start trying to unzip his fly with his one good hand. The other one was someone I hadn’t seen in a long time.
He was staring at me in shock and my face probably went through the same contortions, from disbelief (holy shit) through a kind of happy (well, gosh...) to a kind of guarded look (long time no see, huh pal?).
“Remo,” I said. He looked like he hadn’t changed, same buckskin-colored denim jacket and jeans, his hair and skin sandy to match the jacket, his eyes blue to match the pants. Remo was perpetually thirty nine.
“Daron,” he replied. Then he took a step closer and held out his hand and we shook, which felt stupidly formal. I mean, Remo wasn’t the huggy type anyway, and maybe he was afraid to get soot all over himself, but for someone who had once been like my uncle or my godfather or at least a friend, goddammit, the handshake was wrong. We were both smiling those fake smiles that just curl your lips and nothing else. It had been what, four years since we'd seen each other? But it felt like forty.
I started it. “Jeez, Rem’, whatcha doing here?” Meaning, what are you doing in Providence and also, what are you doing in a dumpy beer bar like The Cage. I thought I did a pretty good job of keeping my voice neutral, but I found myself high strung with anger. We hadn't parted on great terms and in four years I was pretty sure I had graduated from surly teen to genuine angry young man. "Didn't think this'd be your kind of place."
“I was going to say the same thing to you,” he said, his head a little sideways, giving me the same look Doug had given those fucking boots. Askance.
Anger doesn’t lend itself to a witty rejoinder. I said something like “Fuck you,” and Doug’s head whipped toward us.
“Whoa son, I know you’re still sore...”
“Don’t call me son, and don’t be giving me that judgemental look, you...”
“...at least give me a chance to say something before you tear me a new...”
“...what do you have to say about it anyway? Or did you think I was going to play blues all my life after you took off?” Sore was a good word for how I felt, kind of rubbed raw and stiff.
Doug stepped up behind me, though his big-brotherish stance was kind of ruined by his ineffectual attempts to zip himself back up. “You know this guy?”
“Yeah.” I wasn’t sure how to describe who Remo was in relation to me. It was easy, though, to describe him in general terms. Public terms. “This is Remo Cutler, from Nomad.”
Dave’s mouth opened and he went from tough guy to pussycat in an instant. “No shit, man, pleased to meet you! I listen to the Gary’s Garage album all the time. I’m Dave.” He held out the hand with the cast on it and then pulled it back and offered his left. Remo shook.
“Hey, I bet the other guys would love to meet you, too,” Dave said, his hand on the door.
Remo never blushed, just smiled wryly as he eyed the urinal. “I, uh, I did come in here for a reason...”
“Oh yeah, sure, of course,” Dave was saying as he backed out into the noise of the club. “Daron, bring him on backstage. We got beer.”
When the door closed, Remo turned to me. I stood there, not sure what to say or what to do. The standoff was pretty much deflated. He eyed my getup and I resisted the urge to cross my arms over my chest. I was still feeling burned, but didn’t have as much of an urge to yell at him.
“So, uh, how are you?” he tried.
“I’m working.” No thanks to you, I thought. Ooh, that sounded bitter. Immature, even. So I didn’t say it.
“You call this working? Daron, I ... oh, Christ, I have to say this. You look like a five dollar whore. I hope you know that. It’s breaking my heart here, seeing you like this.”
“Well, gee, Rem’, it’s really great to see you, too, after all this time.” This was not happening. This was like one of those nightmares where you show up for the recital and they tell you at the last minute it’s not going to be a guitar recital, it’s going to be a trombone recital instead, and there’s just you and this stupid-looking brass thing and a host of deans staring at you. I’d been having that kind a lot lately, ever since the bill for next semester’s tuition arrived. I could not stand there and let him put me down even if I agreed with him. I knew what I looked like. I turned around and walked out.
In the club it was more loud guitar riffs and thunderous drums on tape. Men in leather jackets held their dates around the waist, heavy-set older guys sat at the bar like fixtures, a couple of women dressed more or less like me but with glittery bras on and very tall teased hair stood around the women’s room door with bottles of beer in their hands, laughing and clutching one another’s arms with long red-nailed fingers. I went back to the wall of beer cases and pushed open the dressing room door. Unlike the men’s room, the dressing room wasn’t insulated from the club noise because the wall didn’t run all the way to the ceiling. The room was stacked with black road cases with TYGERZ stencilled onto them. A flimsy card table held various pieces of band clothing, dry shirts, jackets, street shoes.
Remo was, of course, right behind me.
“Daron.”
I stood in the doorway, wishing I had the Strat on. “What.”
Remo was holding up his hands like he was either surrendering or trying to stop an oncoming truck. “Daron, hang on, jeezus.” He had to shout to be heard. “I haven’t seen you in like three years and I don’t want to spend it in a dust-up with you. At least give me a chance to apologize.”
“If you want to apologize, you can do it after the second set.” I was being cruel now, if I was going to make him sit through Tollman's rendition of David Lee Roth for an hour.
I was surprised he agreed so readily. “Okay. Okay.” He held up one hand like he was waving. “Meet you right here.”
I nodded. Maybe in an hour I’d be feeling better. There was another hour of crazed stage play still to go. Remo went back into the crowd and I shut the door behind me.
Dave handed me an unopened Rolling Rock from the band stash and a lighter. I used the lighter to pry off the lid.
“Hey,” said Ron, “you shouldn’t be drinking.”
I shrugged. I’d been nineteen for a couple of months. There wasn’t much use lying about my age since I didn’t have any advantages like height or good facial hair. I was five foot four, underfed, still wearing the clothes I’d worn in high school because they were what I had. “It ain’t my first beer, Ron.”
“I was only kidding,” he said. He could hold a pair of sticks in the same hand as his beer, and drink, and not get himself in the eyeball with the sticks. “You look like you got punched in the eye.”
“Thanks.” I kind of wondered why Ron carried his sticks everywhere.
Dave tipped his bottle toward the door. “What happened to your friend?”
“He’s constipated,” I said.
Always Something There to Remind Me
I took Remo to The Brickhouse, a blues bar tucked on the edge of Providence’s vacant downtown where the bouncers knew me and wouldn’t bug me about not having ID. I was in there all the time. This was a kind of rough place, a different set of townies from the Cage, with regular brawls, but the music was usually good, blues in the Stevie Ray Vaughn mold which I knew Remo would like. Maybe that meant I wanted to make peace, or at least I felt a little guilty for making him sit through another hour of glam metal covers. I got a root beer in the bottle from the bartender, Remo got a shot of Scotch and paid for both. We sat down on a bench along the back wall and watched the band play for a while. It was almost like old times there except for the kind of sick feeling I had in my chest every time I thought about what I wanted to say. Maybe that’s where that expression comes from, to get something off your chest. I might write a song about it later.
It was too loud to talk and Remo was starting to look impatient, so I pointed out a bouncer, a stocky, beer-bellied guy carrying an air horn. I put my hands over my ears and Remo did the same, watching me. The band finished their set, saying their thank-you-goodnights and then exiting. The crowd, mostly muscley-looking older guys (this was not a collegey kind of place) clapped and cheered for an encore. The bouncer was shouting something we couldn’t make out. The guys pressed the stage. Then the bouncer let loose with the air horn, driving the crowd back. His mouth moved with unheard words while he blasted them. The stubborn men shouted for a while more and then the group broke up, shuffling back to the bar for another drink or heading out the door.
“What was that all about?” Remo said when we took our hands down.
“City says the band has to be off the stage by one-thirty on the dot even though the bar can stay open until two.”
“Is it always like that in here?” He had a bemused look on his face.
“Pretty much.” I took a pull on the root beer and looked around. The Brickhouse wasn’t any more like our old home town place than the Cage was, I guess. Maddie’d never had to chase the crowd out with a horn, that’s for sure. “So. Where were we...”
“I think you were getting ready to tear me a new asshole for leaving you behind in Jersey four years ago.”
Put like that, the anger stuck in my craw. “Oh yeah,” I said. “That’s right.”
“I mean, come on, Daron, you were fifteen. What, was I going to kidnap you or something so you could come with us? The deal was done. Proverbial fame beckoned. So we went. If there’d been some way to take you along...”
“I know.” Of course he was right, but that didn’t ease the itchy old feeling of abandonment. “But you never...” I tried to say it without choking. “I didn’t understand why you had to move to LA. Once you were gone, there was no... Safe Haven for me, anymore.” I couldn’t help but use the title of a song I’d played with them, those years ago.
Remo looked pained—it was a cheap shot, but I had known that would get him. “Jeezus, kiddo...”
“Don’t call me that,” I said, too sharply. “I know you did what you had to. I wasn’t expecting to... I mean, I knew that playing with you guys on Wednesday nights and weekends wasn’t like I was, like, integral or anything.”
“You shut your mouth,” he said, but in a kind way. “If you’d been any older, if you’d...” He shook his head and sipped his scotch. “What did you think you were, our mascot or something?” He was chuckling. “Oh sure, when you were like twelve, it was cute, getting you up there. But.” He took a deep breath. Sitting side by side like we were it was hard to look directly at each other. “You got wronged, all right? Can we leave it at that?”
“Why, is there more to the story than that?”
He jumped a little in his seat, like I’d pricked him with a pin. “I’m just not into assigning blame or whatever. What’s my responsibility, I apologize for it.” He sipped his scotch while his eyes roamed over the thinning crowd. “I didn’t come here to talk about all that old stuff, anyway. I gotta know, what the hell are you doing in Rhode Island? And...” He stopped but I knew he wanted to say: and playing in a cheesy metal cover band looking like a five-dollar whore. “Digger said something about you going to school but...”
“But you never asked him where.” That was a low blow, I saw him wince out of the corner of my eye. “Conservatory. I’m studying classical guitar at RIMCon.”
“Classy.”
“Or I was.” I stole a glance at him and his eyebrows were knit together in disapproval. “I was here on grant money, basically.”
“Scholarship?”
“Sort of. I came up in the fall of 85. I’m supposed to go back in September for my third semester.”
“You don’t sound too sure about that.”
I didn’t want to tell him my problems. You’d think, me being bitter and all, that I’d want to paint as pathetic a picture for him as I could, but no. I wanted him to think I could make it on my own. “I’m working at a recording studio. I’m doing these fill in gigs sometimes.” I wiped bottle condensation from my hand to my jeans. “There’s really no street musicians in Providence to speak of...”
“Hey, kiddo, don’t tell me you’re busking for food money.”
“Don’t call me kid. And I just said there’s no busking in Providence. The place doesn’t have the foot traffic for it.”
He took a bigger swallow of the whiskey and turned on the bench to face me as best he could. “So you got out of New Jersey on this scholarship, landed here, and now you’re hard up for cash.”
“I am not hard up.”
“Daron.”
“Okay, so the economy sucks here and even bands with steady work can’t make enough to live on, unless you count the wedding bands, and even the studios are losing money because nobody can afford to record...”
“And you’re telling me your scholarship doesn’t cover what you need.”
“No. It was a fixed amount of money and it’s basically gone.” I drained the last of the foam out of my bottle and set it down on the bench with a clunk.
“Do you want to go back? To school, I mean.”
“I think so. There’s a lot to learn still. And Bart’s got another year to go, too.”
“Bart?”
“My bass player.” And best friend. The loud growl of motorcycles rumbled the wall behind us and I heard a car honk.
“So you have a band.”
Okay, I smiled. “Yeah, I have a band.” I stared into the dark hole of my bottle. “Of course, I have a band. I mean, what’s the point of living, right?”
“Hot diggety.” He was fishing in the breast pocket of his denim jacket. “You do have a demo tape, right? Here, would you send me one?”
I fished in my own pocket and pulled out a cassette. “Here.” I traded it for his business card.
“Always prepared.”
I sat back, realizing that the thing, whatever it had been, was off my chest. “I was never a Boy Scout and neither were you.”
He put the tape into his own pocket and patted it like it was something precious. “It’s been forever since I’ve heard you play.”
“It’s been about forty five minutes, actually.”
He gave me a cocked eyebrow, a touch of consternation. “I mean really play.”
“Just giving you shit,” I said, and couldn’t help but smirk. “My address and number are on there. Though I don’t know how much longer I’ll be there.”
“And it’s not like you can ask Digger for money. Or Claire.”
I shrugged. My mother had hated me playing the guitar so much she’d forbid me to even practice in the house. And she held the purse strings in the family, so appealing to my father wasn’t likely to do any good. Besides, begging him for money was one thing I never wanted to do. “I could ask, I guess, but I don’t think it’d do any good.”
“You mean you know where to get a hold of Digger?”
I blinked. “Isn’t he at home?”
“Last I heard from him was, what, six months ago or so. He said he was...” Remo trailed off and stared at me.
I must have looked like I’d been hit by a car or something. I said it aloud. “He did it. He left her.”
Remo was nodding.
“Holy fuck.” I decided to look at the floor for a while. “And does the sonofabtich let me know? No.” The abandonment wound sliced open again. Some night this is turning out to be, eh, Daron? “Oh, that motherfucker.”
“He’s been incommunicado. Claire had the phone at the house disconnected, they just hung up on me when I asked for him at the store.” Remo put a hand on my shoulder. “I thought you knew.”
“This is what I get for not calling home more often,” I said, though I didn’t mean it. Claire would always be the one who answered and she more or less treated me like a stranger ever since I moved out. Hell, she treated me like a stranger when I lived there. And what would I have said to her, or to Digger—hey, I’m broke and whoring myself out to poodle-hair bands? Yeah right. Oh, and by the way, I’m living a life of sin and perversion, too. Jeezus.
Remo was staring at me, not blankly, more like he was concentrating very hard, or trying to make some kind of decision.
“Well, anyway,” I said. “I guess I’ll be looking into McDonalds or something next. As soon as I get the money saved up, I can go back to classes. Or, I don’t know, maybe I’ll move.”
“What about the band?”
My shoulders sagged. “Shit, Remo, I don’t know.”
“How much money are we talking, here?”
I held up a hand to stop him. “No. I know I was guilt tripping you earlier but don’t make me a loan because of that.”
“What do I look like, a charity ward?” he said, and it sounded like the old Remo. “Let me finish. How much do you need?”
“About three thousand for the semester.” I was afraid to look at him now, afraid to look too eager, too needy.
“You been keeping up on the latest in live audio?”
“I do what I can.”
“You want a road gig as a guitar tech?”
“Are we talking in theory or in reality? Do you have some friends who need someone or something?” I was trying not to hope too hard because I always end up slapped down and disappointed when I do.
“Yeah, there’s this pretty cool band who are doing a warm-up tour in July, ten dates or so, starts on the West Coast and finishes up in Boston.”
“I need the money by August 30th.” We were practically the only ones in the place now. The clink of empties being collected and glasses washed came from the bar. “So who is this band and will I get along with them?”
“Daron, don’t be thick. I’m talking about Nomad.”
“Well, jeezus, why didn’t you say so.” Now I looked at him. He had this big shit-eating grin on his face and I couldn’t help but feel a jolt of excitement. When I started to talk my tongue got all in my way. “Will I, I mean, will you need any, like, backup playing?”
“Jeezus, you want everything don’t you.”
“You bet I do.”
“Okay, three thousand bucks, I’ll put you in the set somewhere, and, shit, I’ll probably have to get you a guitar, too.”
“You don’t have to...”
“Shut up when I’m being nice. Will you do it?”
I held out my hand to shake and he took it. “Tell me when I leave.”
“We hit the road July 14th. I’ll want you in LA by the first to rehearse with us.”
“That’s in like two weeks, Reem.”
“Just tell me where to mail the plane ticket.”
“You got it.”
I didn’t know what to say after that but it didn’t seem like anything more had to be said. I walked him back to his hotel (There being only one major hotel in downtown Providence, that’s what size city we’re talking about here.) and we took turns carrying the Strat in its case. A fishy smell came from the river which ran mostly under the city and we walked through Kennedy Plaza with night summer breeze tousling my partially de-gelled hair. There were so many things I wanted to know now, things I wanted to talk to him about, like what it was like to tour around the world, to share a bill with Stevie Ray Vaughn or Bruce Springsteen, to appear in advertisements in guitar mags. There were so many things I wanted to tell him about, things that had happened after he’d left, things I’d learned. But they were all things that could wait two weeks and it felt good not to talk, too. The something was off of my chest and, as long as I didn’t think about Digger, I felt damn good.
Promises, Promises
Not thinking about Digger was harder than usual. After I left Remo at his hotel, I walked back to the Aquarium first, to drop off the Strat there, which gave me twenty minutes to listen to Tollman’s boots click on the sidewalk and figure out how I felt about the whole thing. I made my way along North Main, past darkened shops and quiet brownstones, toward the water. There was no one else on the street, no cars, no taxis, though I saw a rat scuttle for the sewer at my approach. Even in June there was a middle of the night chill and I buttoned the bottom buttons of my jacket.
I remembered one night when I was probably eleven years old, the first year Digger started taking me with him when he would sneak out of the house at night, sitting on a barstool at Maddie’s with a glass of root beer in a real beer mug and my feet twisted in the rungs, Digger next to me ordering another Boilermaker. Sometimes when we snuck out it was to see Remo play or to meet Digger’s cronies for poker night, but sometimes we just went out and hung around Madison’s and once or twice Digger tried to teach me to shoot pool. This was one of those nights when there was no agenda, and Maddie and Digger talked about baseball and whatever else. And then at one point he leaned over to me and he said “Hey, kiddo, whatya think? Maybe you and me, should just take off and leave them womenfolk behind.”
I probably said something like sure thing.
“That’s right, I’ll take you with me. We’ll move to the city and go out every night of the week.” I can see him saying it in my mind like a movie that I can rewind and play again and again. Stupid, I thought to myself, what kind of promise is that to make to an eleven year old kid? And what kind of stupid are you to still be thinking about it? I doubt my memory of it, even. In the movie of my memory he’s still wearing a brown suit jacket and tie, the tie all loose around his neck, white dress shirt unbuttoned, the clothes he wore to work in the shoe store. But he usually took them off before we went out—he was usually out of that stuff before dinner time. I don’t know. Maybe I'm making the whole thing up, but I don't think so.
I tried to remember if he’d ever said anything like that again, but I don’t think he did. He never talked about leaving Claire in front of me after that, though he argued with her all the time--no, not argued, they fought but it wasn’t really like an argument with some kind of point that could be won. Maybe that night they’d started fighting before dinner, and he’d tuned her out by parking himself in front of the TV set. Maybe he didn’t even eat dinner with us, just sat there like a zombie, not answering her, not acknowledging anyone, not bothering to go upstairs and change his clothes or anything, until after we were put to bed and she was asleep. That wouldn’t have been the first time, if it was. But I don’t have a clear memory of the evening’s events before that moment in the bar, the foam of the root beer tickling my nose and the smell of booze on Digger’s breath as he conspired with me.
Sad to think that was the closest we had ever been. For a couple of years the sneaking out was our secret; after Claire would mudpack her face or whatever and get in bed with earplugs on (because he snored, she said), Digger would get me out of my pj’s and into jeans and we’d walk down to the main road where Remo or some other friend would pick us up, or we could walk all the way to town center, past the shoe store, to Maddie’s. Yeah, when I was eleven, I thought my dad was the coolest. But by the time I turned fourteen or so, we stopped getting along so well.
I went around to the back of a brick building and unlocked the door to the Aquarium, punched a few numbers on the alarm pad (5-4-42, Bud, the owner’s birthday) and went in. The lights were off and the clock radio on the reception desk glowed blue: 3:05. I untied my sneakers from the handle and slid the Strat case into the hall closet. I thought about leaving Bud a note that I’d have to take a couple of weeks off, but I could just tell him tomorrow. It’s not like he had money to pay me most of the time anyway. Not that I wouldn't have taken steady pay if it had been available, but I needed the experience.
I was tempted to phone Bart from there, to tell him about the gig and what all else. I went around to the receptionist side of the desk, which was fairly well-tiled with colored squares of paper with notes written on them. I didn’t know if they were the sticky kind or if they’d all move if I accidentally swept my arm across the desk. I sat in the chair without disturbing anything. I hadn’t talked to Bart for like two weeks, not since he’d gone to Cape Cod with his father and step-mom. I might have called if it hadn’t been quite so late and if I had been sure I remembered the number. I wanted to ask him if he’d give me a ride to the airport, too. It’d have to wait until tomorrow.
If I started home right away, I’d be there by 3:30, but somehow once I sat down behind the desk I didn’t want to get up. I changed into my sneakers and laid my head carefully on top of Candy’s many notes.
Digger could be kind of hostile to anyone who crossed him--Claire, his cronies, gas station attendants--depending on his mood. Sometimes he was hostile when he was drunk, sometimes only until he got drunk. Sitting there, I started to feel angry again.
The day I’d left home had been one of those television-in-a-tie kind of days, when something Claire had said when he got home, or maybe even something grandad had said at the store, had set him off. He was drinking in the house, which was rare, sitting on the couch with a bottle of Scotch on the coffee table and a juice tumbler, leaning forward every now and then to pour a measure of Scotch into the glass in this very deliberate way. Then he’d sit back and sip and watch, his eyes never leaving the TV screen like the thing he was watching was so important to him that he couldn’t bear to look away from it. I don’t think he even changed the channel: commercials, news, sitcoms, he sat through it all. Claire had long ago given up trying to penetrate his resolve once he got like that. She was in the kitchen cooking something I wanted no part of eating. If I remember it all correctly, my goal was to start walking to the bus station before Janine came home from her job. My other older sister, Lilibeth, was already at college. I don’t know where Courtney was. Maybe Claire had signed her up for some class or something. I don’t know. I put my stuff together, the Strat in its case, clothes and some of the stuff I wanted to keep crammed into a duffel bag, and piled them by the front door.
Digger never looked up once. I stood by the couch, waiting for him to look up. I pretended to be watching the show with him for a few minutes. When a commercial came on, I turned to say something, but he was staring with a clenched-jaw intensity that made me not. I went to the kitchen.
I said to Claire, “I’m going.”
“What do you mean, you’re going? We don’t eat for another half an hour.” She had her long chestnut hair in a tight bun at the back of her head. I’d seen her hair down maybe twice since I was ten years old.
“Mom, I told you, I’m going on a bus at 6:15.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t leave without sitting down to a meal with the family.” Claire had this way of ignoring reality she didn’t like, like the fact that none of my sisters were home, or there was no way Digger was sitting down to eat with any of us that night, or the fact that I was not going to, at the last second, turn into a dutiful son that she could love instead of treating like a tenant. (Did I mention she’d tried to charge me rent that summer?) “What will people say.”
“They won’t say a damn thing if you don’t tell them.” This was as close to a conversation as she and I had come in months. “Really, Mom, it’s time for me to go. So you can quit worrying about what the neighbors think of me.”
“Well, thank goodness for that,” she said, her face pinched. “Maybe with only one of you around here there’ll finally be some peace.”
I sagged. There was something unfair about the fact that just when I’d stopped getting along with Digger, Claire had decided that I was “turning out just like him” and had considered us partners in crime from then on. “Whatever you say, Ma. So glad I could do you a favor.”
She muttered something I couldn’t hear and couldn’t guess and turned her back to me, ostensibly to stir something on the stove.
I went back to Digger. The muttering was contagious, I guess, because he had started muttering at the television. The news was on, which meant I really had to get moving to catch that bus. He was watching one of the local cable stations, channel 68 or something, local news. I recognized a shot of my high school. “Hey man, I’m outta here,” I ventured.
A TV news announcer was describing something about funding cuts in the local school systems, as they showed footage of two school teams I didn’t recognize playing soccer. “Aw shit,” Digger said to himself, or to the television, “stupid fucking faggots can you believe that.”
“I gotta go.”
“What are you, stupid? You can’t cut sports programs, end up with a bunch of nervous nellies.”
This was a pretty weird thing to hear Digger, whose only sport was poker, say. “Dad,” I finally said, “I gotta say goodbye.”
He usually yelled at me for calling him Dad. This time he didn’t even look up. The next news story was about a local fire fighter who was forced to resign when they learned he was gay. I did not stay around to hear what Digger had to say about that. I picked up my bags and I was gone.
And I guess eventually he had done the same, if what Remo said was true. I sat up because I was starting to laugh and I was afraid to mess up Candy's papers. At that moment it struck me funny that I might, really and truly, never hear from him again. I was pissed at him but laughing at the same time. Maybe he had finally pulled off a con that was big, maybe he’d finally cleaned up in poker, maybe he’d finally had enough and took off without a penny. I didn’t care, and it felt good not to care. I moved from the desk chair to the couch and sat there staring at the dark ceiling instead of going home to sleep. In two weeks I’d be on a plane to Los Angeles. And we’ll move to the city and go out every night of the week.... It sounded like a line from a song.
Jet Airliner
If I thought everything would be smooth sailing, or flying, from that point on, I was wrong. Bart and I had a hell of a time pulling up to the terminal because of the weird clusterfuck of road and driveway at TF Green airport, but I hadn't even begun to realize the hassles that awaited a nineteen year old with overlong hair and no driver's license or passport trying to travel. Maybe it was just something about me, but the airline folks decided they wanted proof that I was who was named on the ticket, and were unable to comprehend that not everyone takes Driver Ed when they're sixteen. And besides, I'd grown my hair since then and if I'd had time that week I would have changed my fucking name, anyway.
Eventually a supervisor's supervisor decided my expired RIMCon student ID was good enough and gave me a boarding pass. I went and sat down in the waiting area, at the end of a row of weirdly colored seats, waiting for my flight to take me to LA. A big man in business suit and cowboy hat squeezed by me, his garment bag hanging over his back like a tortoise's shell. Two adults with two children attached stopped in front of me, then circled back the way they came. A loudspeaker overhead called out a string of names, numbers, and cities, all meaningless.
I have dreams sometimes that I am in an airport, or is it a shopping mall? I'm a small child, lost, looking at everyone's knees. It's never the same place twice. Maybe that's why I hate airports. No, that's not why. A uniformed airline employee made an unintelligible announcement into the microphone at the counter. I looked up to see her changing the departure time on the board under 'Flight 235: Los Angeles' from 9:20 to 10:30. I sank down lower in my chair.
I hadn't even reached my seat yet before I got into an argument with a flight attendant over the guitar. His gold name tag read 'Carl' and from his tan skin and blond hair I guessed he must be from Los Angeles. Mr. Neatly Groomed insisted I send it down to be checked with the rest of the luggage. I insisted that it be placed into a compartment in the cabin. "Look, this plane is a DC-10, isn't it?" People were beginning to back up in the aisle while we argued, and I glanced back to see a lot of eyes searching ahead for row numbers and rolling up in heads.
"Yes. But I don't..."
I put on my best grownup voice, my best I'm-not-a-total-idiot voice. "Then I know you have a compartment this will fit in. I booked onto this flight because of that." He pursed his lips at me. Helpless, I resorted to joking. Being aggressive has never gotten me very far. "Look, Carl," I resisted the urge to touch him on the sleeve. "I'm sorry I'm not a trumpet player."
He put both hands around the black case, and gave me half a smile, half a wink, and a motherly pat on the shoulder. "Alright. But let's not have any more trouble out of you, young man."
I sat down hard in my seat. Did I imagine that, or was that a come on? I watched him maneuvering away down the aisle, the black bulk pressed between his hands. I gnawed my thumbnail and tasted salt. I pulled an undersized airline blanket around me and let my hair fall over my face. With my head against the oval window shade, I feigned sleep.
I was not good at ascertaining a man's interest of level in me. Maybe it was a skill that would come with practice. It had been a couple of weeks since I'd last tried to get laid, a difficult affair that involved a tricky bus excursion to Providence's one and only gay bar, a hopeful but fruitless trip to a Brown University dorm, and a long walk alone from College Hill down to where I lived. I'd leave it up to Carl and his suntanned smile, I decided, as the plane moved toward takeoff and I drifted into real sleep.
I Love L.A.
Someone once told me everyone is friendlier in warmer climates, and they might have been right. At the terminal Carl pshawed my idea of taking a cab into LA, and told me I was riding with him into town. He drove a white convertible VW bug and lovingly strapped the Strat into the back seat.
With the top down it was impossible to talk so I just soaked up the sun, palm trees, a lot of stuff I'd seen on MTV. I couldn't believe Remo lived in this town and I found it weird that Los Angeles really did look the way it did in movies. Maybe Carl was taking me a particularly scenic route, but I didn't know. When we got to Carl's place he invited me in. His apartment was nowhere near as anally neat as I'd feared it would be. Still, besides a few scattered magazines and unfolded laundry it lacked the clutter of a bachelor pad, as if here on the Left Coast everything had less substance and would evaporate when left unattended. He hung his uniform duds in the closet, and pulled me onto the bed.
If this all seems sudden, that's because it was. I didn't really give myself time to think about fucking it up and for once, let it happen. He didn't want to chit chat once I got my shirt off, things went really fast after that. Or maybe I lost track of time. It wasn't until after we were done that I realized Remo might be wondering where I was. I told Carl I had to get going and he didn't seem surprised or dismayed by my hurry to leave.
A little ways down the street I found a phone on the outside wall of a bar. The sun was setting somewhere on the other side of the building, and I pumped change into the phone and waited. Remo picked it up on the third ring and heard the hum of something in the background like a vaccuum cleaner.
"Hey, Reem, it's me."
"Hey 'me,' how was your flight?"
"A little delayed, but I'm here now."
"Didn't I give you the address? Just catch a cab and I'll pay him when you get here."
"What if they won't take me?"
"What, do you look homeless or something? Call me if there's problem." The machine sound got louder.
"Right." When I hung up, I noticed a sticker for a cab company half-peeled from the phone and dialed them next. All around the bar, separating the parking lot from the walkway, were round concrete posts. I sat on one and watched the sky turn purple, and for a few minutes, I was satisfied.
Look At Little Sister
I spent most of the next two weeks in and around Nomad's rehearsal studio, getting reacquainted with the music, learning their set up, and getting to know the guys all over again. Years had passed since I'd last seen any of them, so I wasn't sure what to expect when I saw them again, or more precisely, when they saw me, I should say. I shouldn't have worried. Martin, the drummer, with his giant hands and deep set eyes had wrapped his long arms around me, crushing me tight like I was a long lost cousin rescued from a shipwreck. The Mazel brothers, Alex and Alan, settled for a handshake apiece. By the third or fourth day, when Remo brought in two backup singers to flesh out the lineup, I felt almost like we'd never been apart.
The only person I wasn't sure about was Waldo, the road manager. Waldo was a heavy man with uneven sideburns whose constant vice was chewing gum. Remo had introduced me to him with the vague title of "the new guy." Waldo took him aside, like I wasn't standing right there listening.
"He's how old? Nineteen? Jeezus, Remo, has he got insurance? And I don't suppose he's union, no of course not. What do I look like, a babysitter?"
Remo put a firm hand on his shoulder. "Waldo, he's on my payroll. My payroll. Just see to it he gets a per diem and that you've got room for one extra covered in all the reservations." I didn't believe for a second that they hadn't discussed this ten times before. Waldo nodded, but that suspicious look crept into his eye whenever he looked at me.
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