Revival (22 page)

He thought it was true; with the amps off, the tinnitus did seem to be ebbing. But the next morning it was back, and other than the hellish ringing, he could hear almost nothing.

Two members of Johnson Cats fully grasped looming disaster: Felix Granby and Hugh himself. Only three days ahead was the Silverdome, in Pontiac. Capacity ninety thousand. With Detroit favorite Bob Seger headlining, it would be almost full. The JC was on the cusp of fame, and in rock and roll, such chances rarely come around a second time. So Felix Granby had done to Hugh what Kelly Van Dorn of White Lightning had done to me.

“I bore him no grudge,” Hugh said. “If our positions had been reversed, I might have done the same. He hired a session player out of L'Amour Studio in Detroit, and it was that guy who went onstage with them that night at the Dome.”

Granby did the firing in person, not by talking but by writing notes and holding them up for Hugh to read. He pointed out that while the other members of the JC came from middle-class families, Hugh was from real money. He could fly back to Colorado in a comfy seat at the front of the plane, and consult all the best doctors. Granby's last note, written in capital letters, read: U WILL BE BACK WITH US BEFORE U KNOW IT.

“As if,” Hugh said as we sat in the shade, eating our sandwiches from Tubby's.

“You still miss it, don't you?” I asked.

“No.” Long pause. “Yes.”

 • • •

He did not go back to Colorado.

“If I had've, I sure wouldn't have flown. I had an idea my head might explode once we got above twenty thousand feet. Besides, home wasn't what I wanted. All I wanted to do was lick my wounds, which were still bleeding, and Detroit was as good a lickin place as any. That's the story I told myself, anyway.”

The symptoms did not abate: vertigo, nausea ranging from moderate to severe, and always that hellish ringing, sometimes soft, sometimes so loud he thought his head would split open. On occasion all these symptoms would draw back like a tide going out, and then he would sleep for ten or even twelve hours at a stretch.

Although he could have afforded better, he was living in a fleabag hotel on Grand Avenue. For two weeks he put off going to a doctor, terrified that he would be told he had a malignant and inoperable brain tumor. When he finally did force himself into a doc-in-the-box on Inkster Road, a Hindu medic who looked about seventeen listened, nodded, did a few tests, and urged Hugh to check himself into a hospital for more tests, plus experimental antinausea medications he himself could not prescribe, so sorry.

Instead of going to the hospital, Hugh began taking long and pointless safaris (when the vertigo permitted it, that was) up and down the fabled stretch of Detroit road known as 8-Mile. One day he passed a storefront with radios, guitars, record players, tape decks, amplifiers, and TVs in the dusty window. According to the sign, this was Jacobs New & Used Electronics . . . although to Hugh Yates, most of it looked beat to shit and none of it looked new.

“I can't tell you exactly why I went in. Maybe it was some creeped-out nostalgia for all that audio candy. Maybe it was self-flagellation. Maybe I just thought the place would be air-­conditioned, and I could get out of the heat—boy, was I ever wrong about that. Or maybe it was the sign over the door.”

“What did it say?” I asked.

Hugh smiled at me. “
You Can Trust the Rev
.”

 • • •

He was the only customer.
The shelves were packed with equipment a lot more exotic than the wares in the window. Some stuff he knew: meters, oscilloscopes, voltometers and voltage regulators, amplitude regulators, rectifiers, power inverters. Other stuff he didn't recognize. Electric cords snaked across the floor and wires were strung everywhere.

The proprietor came out through a door framed in blinking Christmas lights (“Probably a bell jingled when I came in, but I sure didn't hear it,” Hugh said). My old fifth business was dressed in faded jeans and a plain white shirt buttoned to the collar. His mouth moved in
Hello
and something that might have been
Can I help you
. Hugh tipped him a wave, shook his head, and browsed along the shelves. He picked up a Stratocaster and gave it a strum, wondering if it was in tune.

Jacobs watched him with interest but no detectable concern, although Hugh's rock-dog 'do now hung in unwashed clumps to his shoulders and his clothes were equally dirty. After five minutes or so, just as he was losing interest and getting ready to walk back to the fleabag where he now hung his hat, the vertigo hit. He reeled, putting out one hand and knocking over a disassembled stereo speaker. He almost recovered, but he hadn't been eating much, and the world turned gray. Before he hit the shop's dusty wooden floor, it had turned black. It was my story all over again. Only the location was different.

When he woke up, he was in Jacobs's office with a cold cloth on his forehead. Hugh apologized and said he would pay for anything he might have broken. Jacobs drew back, blinking in surprise. This was a reaction Hugh had seen often in the last weeks.

“Sorry if I'm talking too loud,” Hugh said. “I can't hear myself. I'm deaf.”

Jacobs rummaged a notepad from the top drawer of his cluttered desk (I could imagine that desk, littered with snips of wire and batteries). He jotted and held the pad up.

Recent? I saw you w/ guitar
.

“Recent,” Hugh agreed. “I have something called Ménière's disease. I'm a musician.” He considered that and laughed . . . soundlessly to his own ears, although Jacobs responded with a smile. “
Used
to be, anyhow.”

Jacobs turned a page in his notebook, wrote briefly, and held it up:
If it's Menière's, I might be able to do something for you
.

 • • •

“Obviously he did,”
I said.

Lunch hour was over; the girls had gone back inside. There was stuff I could be doing—plenty—but I had no intention of leaving until I heard the rest of Hugh's story.

“We sat in his office for a long time—conversation's slow when one person has to write his side of it. I asked him how he thought he could help me. He wrote that just lately he'd been experimenting with transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation, TENS for short. He said the idea of using electricity to stimulate damaged nerves went back thousands of years, that it was invented by some old Roman—”

A dusty door far back in my memory opened. “An old Roman named Scribonius. He discovered that if a guy with a bad leg stepped on an electric eel, the pain sometimes went away. And that ‘just lately' stuff was crap, Hugh. Your Rev was playing around with TENS before it was officially invented.”

He stared at me, eyebrows up.

“Go on,” I said.

“Okay, but we'll come back to this, right?”

I nodded. “You show me yours, I show you mine. That was the deal. I'll give you a hint: there's a fainting spell in my story, too.”

“Well . . . I told him that Ménière's disease was a mystery—­doctors didn't know if it had to do with the nerves, or if it was a virus causing a chronic buildup of fluid in the middle ear, or some kind of bacterial thing, or maybe genetic. He wrote,
All diseases are electrical in nature
. I said that was crazy. He just smiled, turned to a new page in his pad, and wrote for a longer time. Then he handed it across to me. I can't quote it exactly—it's been a long time—but I'll never forget the first sentence:
Electricity is the basis of all life.
”

That was Jacobs, all right. The line was better than a fingerprint.

“The rest said something like,
Take your heart. It runs on microvolts. This current is provided by potassium, an electrolyte. Your body converts potassium into ions—electrically charged particles—and uses them to regulate not just your heart but your brain and EVERYTHING ELSE.

“Those last words were in capitals. He put a circle around them. When I handed his pad back, he drew something on it, very quick, then pointed to my eyes, my ears, my chest, my stomach, and my legs. Then he showed me what he'd drawn. It was a lightning bolt.”

Sure it was.

“Cut to the chase, Hugh.”

“Well . . .”

 • • •

Hugh said he'd have to think it over.
What he didn't say (but was certainly thinking) was that he didn't know Jacobs from Adam; the guy could be one of the crazybirds that flap around every big city.

Jacobs wrote that he understood Hugh's hesitation, and felt plenty of his own. “I'm going out on a limb to even make the offer. After all, I don't know you any more than you know me.”

“Is it dangerous?” Hugh asked in a voice that was already losing tone and inflection, becoming robotic.

The Rev shrugged and wrote.

Won't kid you, there is some risk involved in applying electricity directly through the ears. But LOW VOLTAGE, OK? I'd guess the worst side effect you'd suffer might be peeing your pants.

“This is crazy,” Hugh said. “We're insane just to be having this discussion.”

The Rev shrugged again, but this time didn't write. Only looked.

Hugh sat in the office, the cloth (still damp but now warm) clutched in one hand, seriously considering Jacobs's proposal, and a large part of his mind found serious consideration, even on such short acquaintance, perfectly normal. He was a musician who had gone deaf and been cast aside by a band he'd helped to found, one now on the verge of national success. Other players and at least one great composer—Beethoven—had lived with deafness, but hearing loss wasn't where Hugh's woes ended. There was the vertigo, the trembling, the periodic loss of vision. There was nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, galloping pulse. Worst of all was the almost constant tinnitus. He had always thought deafness meant silence. This was not true, at least not in his case. Hugh Yates had a constantly braying burglar alarm in the middle of his head.

There was another factor, too. A truth not acknowledged until then, but glimpsed from time to time, as if in the corner of the eye. He had remained in Detroit because he was working up his courage. There were many pawnshops on 8-Mile, and all of them sold barrel-iron. Was what this guy was offering any worse than the muzzle of a thirdhand .38 socked between his teeth and pointing at the roof of his mouth?

In his too-loud robot's voice, he said, “What the fuck. Go ahead.”

 • • •

Hugh gazed at the mountains
while he told the rest, his right hand stroking his right ear as he spoke. I don't think he knew he was doing it.

“He put a CLOSED sign in the window, locked the door, and dropped the blinds. Then he sat me down in a kitchen chair by the cash register and put a steel case the size of a footlocker on the counter. Inside it were two metal rings wrapped in what looked like gold mesh. They were about the size of those big dangly earrings Georgia wears when she's stylin. You know the ones I mean?”

“Sure.”

“There was a rubber widget on the bottom of each, with a wire coming out of it. The wires ran into a control box no bigger than a doorbell. He opened the bottom of the box and showed me what looked like a single triple-A battery. I relaxed. That
can't do much damage
, I thought, but I didn't feel quite so comfortable when he put on rubber gloves—you know, like the kind women wear when they're washing dishes—and picked up the rings with tongs.”

“I think Charlie's triple-A batteries are different from the ones you buy in the store,” I said. “A lot more powerful. Didn't he ever talk to you about the secret electricity?”

“Oh God, many times. It was his hobbyhorse. But that was later, and I never made head or tail of it. I'm not sure he did, either. He'd get a look in his eyes . . .”

“Puzzled,” I said. “Puzzled, worried, and excited, all at the same time.”

“Yeah, like that. He put the rings against my ears—using the tongs, you know—and then asked me to push the button on the control unit, since his own hands were full. I almost didn't, but I flashed on the pistols in all those pawnshop windows, and I did it.”

“Then blacked out.” I didn't ask it as a question, because I was sure of it. But he surprised me.

“There were blackouts, all right, and what I called prismatics, but they came later. Right then there was just an almighty
snapping
sound in the middle of my head. My legs shot out and my hands went up over my head like a schoolkid who's just desperate to tell the teacher he knows the right answer.”

That
brought back memories.

“Also, there was a taste in my mouth. Like I'd been sucking on pennies. I asked Jacobs if I could have a drink of water, and
heard
myself asking, and broke into tears. I cried for quite awhile. He held me.” At last Hugh turned from the mountains and looked at me. “After that I would have done anything for him, Jamie.
Anything
.”

“I know the feeling.”

“When I had control of myself again, he took me back out into the shop and put a pair of Koss headphones on me. He plugged into an FM station and kept turning the music down and asking me if I could hear it. I did until he got all the way to zero, and I could almost swear I even heard it then. He not only brought my hearing back, it was more acute than it had been since I was fourteen, and playing with my first jam-band.”

 • • •

Hugh asked how he could repay
Jacobs. The Rev, only a scruffy guy in need of a haircut and a bath, considered this.

“Tell you what,” he said at last. “There's little in the way of business here, and some of the people who do wander in are pretty sketchy. I'm going to transport all this stuff to a storage facility on the North Side while I think about what to do next. You could help me.”