Crime Plus Music (23 page)

When he got back to his dressing room, she was waiting for him. Carla Saroyan, his poison. Carla was, for lack of a better term, his girlfriend-manager-agent. In terms of all three, Terry had run through many of each since the General died of a stroke on August 27, 1967. Not many people noticed the General's passing because it happened the same day Brian Epstein, The Beatles's manager, died. Izzy's son, Bobby, had taken over for his dad, but he didn't have a stomach for the sharp-elbowed, rough-and-tumble managerial aspects of the business. He did, however, have a taste for publishing royalties, a gluttonous, insatiable taste.

Fed up with Bobby Gettleman neglecting his bookings and squeezing every nickel out of his songs, Terry Jim left Bobby and accepted a ridiculously small settlement for his remaining percentage of the publishing rights. But the way Terry figured it, between the investments the General had made for him, his gigs and the settlement, he'd be good. What he hadn't figured on was two very brief and very expensive marriages. He also hadn't figured on Led Zeppelin and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.

The early seventies had been unkind to Terry Jim. Squeezed out on the one side by Moogs and metal chords and on the other side by the Carpenters and Gilbert O'Sullivan, Terry couldn't get arrested. From '71 to '74, he'd run through a series of managers and agents, many of whom made promises no one could have kept. Still, even the sleaziest of the bunch, which was really saying something, could claim it wasn't for a lack of trying. None of them, not the legitimate ones who'd taken Terry on out of respect for the General or Terry's talent or the ones who had latched onto him to suck him dry of whatever juice he might have left, could create a demand out of thin air. By '75, he was tapped out, living back in the basement of his folks' house in Carroll Gardens and making whatever few bookings he could for himself.

Then he got a call from Lefty Farmer, a bass player with whom he'd done several recording sessions. Lefty, who'd heard Terry was down on his luck, said that he needed a singer and guitarist for a backup band he'd been hired to put together. Some girl singer from Toronto, billed as the Canadian Linda Ronstadt, was doing gigs in the New York area. Terry Jim didn't think twice about it. The gigs and the girl singer were mostly forgettable, but not her manager.

Carla Saroyan had once been gorgeous, a cover girl model with impossibly black hair, perfect dark olive skin, brown eyes so dark they were nearly as black as her hair. Her body had been an amazing blend of curves and sinew, but it was her mouth that men and women alike could never see past. In the business, the modeling agencies used to refer to Carla as “The Mouth.” She had made the bulk of her modeling money doing lipstick, lip gloss, and toothpaste ads.

By the time Terry met her, Carla's looks had faded some with age and stress. Modeling, it seemed, had an even shorter shelf life than rock stardom, which is why she decided to go into talent management. Carla and Terry were perfectly mismatched as they shared the same weaknesses: drugs, sex, and spending. Worse for Terry, though, was Carla's appetite for gambling. She had the bug bad. She would as soon bet on cockroach races as the Belmont Stakes.

But for whatever reason, she delivered bookings for Terry where all the others had failed. She had gotten him this
Dance Mania
spot, though it had taken her a lot of convincing to get him to do it.

“It's a relaunch moment, baby. We're going to remind the older fans of your glory and introduce you to a new generation.”

In his darker moments, which were in no short supply these days, he suspected Carla of trading herself for his gigs. He never asked. It wasn't that he didn't care. It was that desperation helped make him conveniently blind.

“Hi, lover,” she cooed, tossing her cigarette onto the floor of the trailer and snuffing it out beneath her shoe. “You okay? You look nervous.”

“You know the way I feel about this gig, how ridiculous I feel.”

Then, before he could say another word, she kissed him hard on the lips, sliding her tongue into his mouth, slipping her hands beneath his suit jacket and pressing her long nails into his back.

“Let me make it all better like I always do,” she whispered in his ear, dropping to her knees.

She rubbed her cheeks up against his crotch, reaching for his zipper. When she found the metal tab, she tugged it slowly down, fished out his semi-hard cock and put it in her mouth. He got that jolt as he always did when Carla put him in her mouth, but he clamped his hands around her shoulders, pushed her away and pulled her up onto her feet.

“Stop it! Just stop it!”

“But, lover—”

“No.” He zipped up. “We've got to talk.”

She lit another cigarette.

“Don't do that. I have to go on. You know what smoke does to my voice.”

She cackled at him. “Yeah, and it really kills your voice on an eleven-year-old playback tape of ‘Thriller Man.' Next thing you're gonna tell me is that it fucks up your lip-synching.”

“Don't be cruel.”

“Stealing Elvis songs now, Geraldo?”

“Don't call me that.”

“Geraldo. Geraldo. Geraldo. What are you gonna do about it?”

He turned to look at himself in the mirror again. He felt even more ridiculous than he had before the stage assistant had come to retrieve him. And as he stared at himself it hit him that he just couldn't go through with it. That he'd sooner go back to singing “Michael Row Your Boat Ashore” or unloading lettuce crates off trucks at three in the morning than to sing—lip-synch—“Thriller Man” again. That Carla's line about a relaunch moment was a load of crap that he forced himself to swallow one spoonful at a time. That he still had an ounce of pride left somewhere.

She poked him with a fingernail. “I said, ‘What are you gonna do about it, Geraldo?'”

Now it was his turn to laugh. “It's what I'm not going to do about it,” he said, pouring on his phony down home accent like a ladle of red-eye gravy.

“What the fuck is that supposed to—”

“You know what it means, Carla. I'm not singing that fucking song again. Never. Not ever. Not tonight. Not—”

Her eyes got wide with panic. “But, Terry—”

“What happened to Geraldo?”

She snuffed out her cigarette and threw her arms around him. “I'm sorry, Terry. I'm sorry.”

“Me, too, darlin'.” There was his accent again. “But I'm outta here.” He reached for his Telecaster.

“You have to do it, Terry. You have to.”

“No, I don't, Carla. It took this stupid disco dance show to make me see that. Took me having to get so low that I would go out and embarrass myself on national TV. Live TV!” He laughed again. “Live TV, what a joke. I was going to go out there and lip-synch a fucking song I recorded a million years ago. They're not even going to let me plug in, for fuck's sake. I'm ashamed I ever let it get this far.”

“No, Terry, it's you who doesn't understand,” Carla said, her voice frosty and clear, her eyes narrowing. “People expect you to do this.”

“People? Fuck people.”

“Wrong answer, Terry. These are the kind of people who fuck you, not the kind that you fuck. How else do you think a washed-up fake with a half-limp dick like you got a gig on a national TV?”

“I suppose if I thought about it, I would say your oral talents and willingness to bed down anyone with a pulse had something to do with it.”

She cackled again, only this time it was very shrill and brittle. “No one's that good, Terry. Not even me. You got this gig because I sold your contract to some people.”

“Sold?”

“I owed these people, Terry. I owed them a lot and they were willing to let me off the hook if I gave them my rights to manage you and if you would make this appearance. They have power. They can get you a lot more gigs. So you see how it is, right?”

“Explain it to me, honey,” he said, his accent all South Brooklyn again. “Explain it so that even a dumb mope from Carroll Gardens can understand it.”

She shrugged. “Okay, then. If you walk out of here, they're going to hurt me, Terry. They say it won't be too bad. That they'll just break my legs. They won't touch my face. Not this time.”

“That's too bad, Carla. But once your legs heal, you'll still be able to spread 'em again.” He wiped the neck of his guitar, then laid it in its case. Stood up. “And to think I really used to love you.”

She ignored that. “It's a little late in the game for indignation and jealousy, don't you think? I'll be able to spread my legs, Terry, but you won't have any legs anymore. You don't go out there and do what you're supposed to do, you're dead. And it won't go easy for you. The guys I sold your contract to, they don't fuck around.”

“What do they even want my contract for, anyway? I'm barely making enough for you to lose.”

“Who knows? You were all I had left to barter. Maybe they think they can launder money with you as a front or maybe one of the old guys liked the way you used to sing. Maybe they want you to be the regular act at the Gemini Lounge on Flatbush Avenue. You ever hear of Roy DeMeo?”

“Why? He the guy who bought me?”

Carla shook her head. “He works for the guys who bought you and he's crazy. He likes killing people. He shoots you in the head, chops your body up, and throws it in the Fountain Avenue dump. And that's if he likes you. If he doesn't like you, he skips the shooting in the head part and goes right to the hacking you up part.” She relaxed and came over by Terry again. “So stop being stupid about this and let me make it better the way I always do,” Carla said, bending to her knees yet again. “They said I can still travel with you if that's what you want. Let me make you want that, Terry. Let me.”

He let her.

I
T
'
S TIME
, M
R
. L
AKE
.

As they walked once again from the trailer, through the crowd assembled outside and into the club, the stage girl explained once again how it was going to work, but it all sounded like blah blah blah, blah blah blah. Terry was too busy time traveling to listen. He was back at the air base in Germany. Back offloading trucks. Back on stage at Café Wha? and Folk City. Back with the General having deli at Katz's on Houston Street, planning their next moves. Back in his apartment on Park Avenue, showing his Jimi Hendrix letter to everyone who came by. Back making appearances on
American Bandstand
,
Where the Action Is
,
Hootenanny
, and
The Ed Sullivan Show
.

“Okay, Mr. Lake,” she said, “get ready. Remember go to the center of the dance floor, watch for the director's cue, and begin playing and lip synching. Try not to actually sing because we don't want the live mics to pick it up. Go!” She clutched him by the biceps and pushed him toward the dance floor, which again was lit from below with an array of flashing colored lights.

The director gave him the cue, but there was a delay in the playback. So he began fingering the chords and plucking his silent strings ahead of the recording. Then came that twangy intro a few seconds behind where he was in the song. His lip-synching was out of synch, so he was mouthing the lyrics—
Gabe and Gigi lived the lives of nomads
—before the vocal playback began. And somehow in the midst of that technical snafu it all came together for him. He realized he didn't give a fuck about Carla's legs or even his own. He didn't care about Roy DeMeo or his bosses or anyone else. He wasn't going to do it. He wasn't going to play this fucking song again, not ever.

He stopped fingering the chords. Stopped lip-synching altogether. Then he started fingering and strumming again. Started singing, loudly. Loudly enough so that the open mics clearly picked up his voice. But he wasn't singing “Thriller Man.”

Dante Ferrara turned to the director. “Go to commercial. Go to commercial. What the fuck is he singing?”

Carla, who'd followed Terry in, said, “You don't know this? It was a big hit, ‘Look At Me/Don't Look At Me.'”

“Nah, that ain't it,” said the pudgy-faced man with the dead eyes and the slick black hair, over Ferrara's left shoulder. “It's a whatchamacallit it. . . . A swan song. Yeah, like that.”

Carla opened her mouth to disagree, but when she looked into the man's bottomless eyes, she closed her mouth. She didn't bother trying to run, either. Why piss off the debt collector? She had heard a broken femur was terribly painful. She couldn't imagine how painful two would be. She figured she wouldn't have to imagine for very long. Terry had just seen to that. But like Terry had said, she'd be able to spread her legs again. She laughed to herself. She had never believed him when he said he hated that stupid “Thriller Man” song. She believed him now. You couldn't have asked for more proof.

ONLY WOMEN BLEED

BY GALADRIELLE ALLMAN

O
NCE
THE
CURVING
MAZE
OF
manicured streets that surrounded the Ponte Vedra Country Club was behind us and the wealthiest kids were dropped at their doorsteps, our bus driver, Sherry Walker, began to relax. Each day as she settled the yellow Blue Bird school bus at the long red light between Kmart and the massive used-car lot with the fluttering pennants strung up high, Miss Walker would pull a pair of pink rubber flip-flops out of an Army duffel she kept tucked under the driver's seat, kick off her gray sneakers and groan with relief. Her heels were permanently stained with beach tar and the pink polish on her toes was chipped and dirty. The last half hour of my two-hour ride home from school was shared with only three other kids, all of them boys who also lived at the funky end of the Jacksonville Beaches, near the cheap motels, crumbling condos, drive-thru liquor stores, and tourist gift shops stuffed with dyed seashells and cheap beach towels. Miss Walker told the four of us beach kids we could call her Sherry, as long as all the rich kids were gone, but that never felt right. She told us she lived down at the Beaches too, off Atlantic Boulevard behind the old Pick 'n Save building that had stood empty for years. I thought of her whenever my mom drove by the wrecked store, its broken windows showing the toppled shelves and tangled wires inside.

Sherry Walker was what my mom would have called a “real trip,” if I had told her the way she talked to us at the end of our long days. I knew better. Something in the way Miss Walker's eyes shined and bored into mine while she talked made it clear the things she said were between us. She always wore the same grubby mechanic's coveralls splattered with white paint and spotted with grease. She tucked her bleached curls under a battered blue ball cap, the brim cocked back like a proud duck bill, showing her high, damp forehead. As she closed in on the ocean, she rocked us in the hull of her steaming bus, a captive audience of four, and began to talk. She liked to talk to the boys on the bus about guitar players and who was the best and all that, and she saved family stories for me, about her sister who was sick in the hospital all the time, or her husband who crushed his empty beer cans under his boot heel on her kitchen floor while he stared at football on TV. She drove fast but steady the whole time, saying she didn't get paid near enough for how careful she was with each and every one of us, each and every day.

It was a blistering Friday in late May, near the end of the school year, all of us restless and ready for summer to start, and Miss Walker was in a weird mood. She was shifting in her seat more than usual and heaving sighs like she wanted someone to ask her a question so she could complain out loud. I was squirming, too. I got the curse for the third time ever during PE, and it was making me miserable. My back and middle ached and I worried all afternoon it would leak and show. Bleeding just generally makes everything worse. I tried to keep track of when it was coming on my school calendar, but it surprised me anyway. I carried a couple of thick maxi pads wrapped in an extra pair of underwear in my backpack all the time. I never told my mom after the first time it came. We didn't feel close just then and I knew she'd talk about the moon and womanhood and try to hug me. I just slipped pads from her supply under the bathroom sink and hoped she wouldn't notice for a while.

Jesse and the other two boys, Kevin and Davy, sat at the very back of the bus, slumped down with their knees propped against the green vinyl seats in front of them, talking too low for me to hear. I suspect they were looking at the nudie magazines I know Jesse stole from his dad, but they were careful not to get caught. What I heard was the stomping, old timey piano opening to “Bennie and the Jets.” It was coming from the little gray radio with the long silver antenna Jesse always carried. It's one of my favorite songs and Jesse knew it, too. We must have spent a million hours listening to rock radio, playing Name That Tune, like the TV show. When we were little, we thought we invented the game where the first person to recognize a song and name the band gets a point, the most points win. I beat Jesse all the time.

Jesse Leander was my best friend for most all of my life, before it mattered that he was a boy and I'm a girl. He lived alone with his daddy in a ranch-style house tucked back in the woods about a mile from me. Jesse's daddy coached football at the Beaches high school and he was hard on Jesse. He yelled that Jesse's soft and he made him do pushups in their driveway for being mouthy or lazy. Jesse would cut his angry eyes at me and blow air out of his nose like a hot horse if he heard me say it, but it was true: he had a tender heart. When we were young, if we found a turtle that had flipped over in the road and starved that way, Jesse would hide his face so I wouldn't know he was crying. Just thinking of all the dogs in the world that had to wander the streets alone because people didn't love them anymore kept him up nights. We'd been in school together since kindergarten, and even when we were babies, our moms were friends, but Jesse's mom died of cancer and we didn't talk about that, but one time, late at night when he was still allowed to sleep over, his feet resting on the pillow next to my head, my feet beside his. That night he let me see him cry. Then his dad started making crude jokes about how he'd be a fool to let us share a bed, now that I was a little woman, and Jesse and I drifted apart.

Jesse stopped sitting with me on the bus this year. We never had to work it out that way, it was just clear from the first day. I sat in the front and he sat in the way back, girls with girls and boys with boys. Last year, he sat in the seat right behind me and even braided my ponytail over the back of the bench seat sometimes, slow and like he wasn't even thinking about it, his hands just working on their own. He would never do that now. He sat with his two idiot friends and listened to music like we used to. Jesse and I both know more about rock 'n' roll than Kevin and Davy ever will, but still he chose them over me.

Just as that ugly thought formed in my mind like a fist, I felt a dry thump on the back of my head and heard the boys laugh. A ball of notebook paper rolled into my lap and onto the seat beside me. I had been beaned in the head, probably by Kevin, the rudest kid I ever met. I shoved the wad into my backpack without opening it up, even though I see black writing on the edges of the paper. I tried to hear if Jesse was really laughing too, but I wouldn't let myself turn around to be sure.

Sherry Walker saw it happen in the long rearview mirror mounted over her head. I could tell by the pitying look in her reflected eyes. They're big and pale blue, smeared all around with black eyeliner and wily, darting between our faces and the road the whole long ride. She just sighed and changed the angle of the window beside her that pivoted smoothly in and out on a hinge, trying to catch a breeze and bring it in. The early summer days were long and over one hundred degrees and that could make a body crazy. That's how Sherry started.

“The freaks come out when it gets this hot, I tell you what. It's a dangerous time, and you best be careful out here,” she said pointing her chin at my reflection. She looked a little like one of my sister's baby dolls, her round cheeks splotched pink and her bottom lip poked out in a permanent pout.

“Did y'all hear what happened in Palm Valley, out in the woods? Come up here so I can talk at you and turn that radio off,” she said, raising her voice to the boys in the back.

They didn't move right away, but she waved her right hand around like a crossing guard and the boys drug themselves down the center aisle, grumbling.

“It's a real terrible story and I probably shouldn't even tell it to you, but you need to know what's out here,” she said, jerking her head toward her window. One corner of her mouth turned up in a sly smile, but her eyes were deadly serious.

“I'm gonna tell you what men are really like.”

I looked over my shoulder at Jesse, now sitting across the narrow aisle and one row back from me. His arms were crossed on the seat in front of him, his chin resting on his interlaced fingers. He darted his dark brown eyes at me for a second and rolled them, a look that said
Yeah, right.

“It was them bikers, that gang that hangs out at Snoopy's Bar?” she said in her low, gruff voice. Sherry was a smoker, and you could hear the damage it's done. “Y'all know about Snoopy's?”

“A gang?” Kevin snorted, like it's a ridiculous idea.

“Yes, a gang. A motorcycle club. We got all sorts of biker clubs out here. Haven't you ever seen 'em, riding all together in their leathers?”

Sherry Walker looked into her high mirror and glared at us, waiting for a response, so we nodded slowly, not sure at all.

“The bikers set their sights on a real pretty blond girl who they always noticed walking down the side of the road by the bar. She worked with her daddy clearing yards and bagging leaves and was out raking and hauling with him most every day. They were way too poor for her to go to school. Do you know how lucky you are just to have school?”

Miss Walker gave her question a little air, then started up again when we stayed silent.

“One of them big mean dudes was drinking at Snoopy's, and first he sees that pretty girl's daddy, so blind drunk at the bar, he can't barely sit up. Then the biker sees the girl walking down the road alone when he goes outside to leave, and he decides to follow her. He keeps his bike back behind her a ways, but she can hear his rumbling engine. She starts walking faster until she gets to the dirt road where her daddy's trailer is parked, then she flat out runs. Just then, with home in sight, that biker goes roaring off, laughing. Well, now he knows her street, and that she's all on her own, and she don't even realize it; she thinks he's long gone. Well, he goes right back to the clubhouse to get his crew.”

“Clubhouse? Like Mickey Mouse?” Kevin asked, loud and sarcastic and the boys chittered like monkeys in a zoo. I realized I was holding my breath, and I let it out.

“The gang meets up in an old barn they built out with bunks and a stripper pole. They call it their clubhouse and believe me it ain't nothing to joke about. So, anyhow, the one rider tells his five buddies he knows this sweet little piece of ass and they should go and get her.”

I pulled my knees up and stretched my T-shirt over my bare legs, and started double-knotting my tennis-shoe laces while I listened. This story was going nowhere nice, and Miss Walker's eyes were making me nervous. I realized I could smell the rotten scent of blood gathering in the pad under my shorts and I put my legs back down, horrified. I took my sweatshirt out of my bag and unfolded it over my lap.

“So off they go. Now, have you ever seen a pack of bikers riding together down the highway? Forget seeing it, did you ever hear it? They're the loudest bunch of machines you ever heard, like to make you go deaf, and all the hairs on your body just stand up and salute when they go by.”

Sherry took her right hand off the wheel and gave a quick salute then laughed so hard she started to cough. After her hacking settled down, she stared in silence at the road in front of us for a long minute, knowing we're hungry for her next sentence. I shifted forward in my seat.

“The bikers found that little silver trailer parked in a clearing, and started to circle it like a pack of starved dogs hunting. They was so loud, that girl thought a plane was about to land on her roof, so she opened her door right up, not even the sense to be scared. She just stands on the little wooden steps her daddy built, watching those bikes stirring up clouds of dust, their engines gunning full blast. The only thing worse than the sound of them bikes screaming is the terrible sound when they cut them engines off. It went dead quiet.” Miss Walker went quiet too. “That's the moment that little girl knows she needs to get inside and hide.”

“Little girl? How old was she?” I asked, surprised how loud my voice sounded in the hollow bus. My hands had gone cold even though it was so hot sweat was rolling out from under my hair and down my back.

Sherry's smile showed her yellowed teeth and she squinted her eyes at me.

“Just about your age, maybe twelve? Old enough to know better,” she said with a bitter laugh.

“I'm thirteen,” I whispered, too low for her to hear.

“So, do I need to tell y'all that she couldn't hide? They stomped right up those little wooden steps, kicked that metal door in, broke the lock and yanked her right out of her room by her long blond hair. She was hiding under her bed! Isn't that the first place anybody would look?”

Kevin and Davy both nodded, their eyes glued to Miss Walker's in the mirror. Jesse's face showed nothing; a perfect stillness had taken him over.

“The leader of the pack got the honor of tying that girl up to the back of his bike. He used an extension cord he tore right out of her wall. And off they go, those six bikes cut right through the woods behind her trailer as fast as lightning.”

I looked out the window and felt like I couldn't see the strip malls or the tangled green in the empty lots between clearly. My eyes were looking into the woods from the back of a careening motorbike, breaking through low pine branches, engines growling in my ears.

“Them bikers was smart enough not to drag that girl back to their barn. If her daddy sobered up enough to send the police out looking, they would go right to those outlaws' crib. So, they go into the pines, deeper and deeper, riding little dirt horse paths until they get to a spot only they know. They have a secret place where they party and do their worst. They'd hauled a bunch of old moldy couches out there and pulled 'em into a circle around a big black pit for fires.”

I was still thinking about the extension cord, and if the girl was tied upright or hung over the back of the seat on her belly, but this new detail interrupted my thought. I wondered how could anybody carry heavy sofas out between the dense trees, especially in secret, but I didn't ask.