Rock On (22 page)

Last Rising Sun

Graham Joyce

That number came on the radio today. I wanted to knock it off but the guy in the next bed said he liked it, so I let it play. Just another dose of déjà vu. I lie here thinking of what happened to Colleen, and how it all could have been different. I think of that old bastard her father. And lying here in bed like this reminds me of when I was a kid.

I used to lie awake at nights and hear that number ghosting from the All-Nite Milk Bar, wondering exactly what those folk were putting in their milk. I couldn’t really understand it. I’d drunk milk. I knew its best effects. Let me tell you there’s nothing about milk would make me want to stay up talking until 3:00 a.m.

We lived close enough to the milk bar so that, if the wind was right, the music from that huge Wurlitzer could hitch a ride on a swelling breeze and jump off in a clatter right outside my bedroom window. My old man was always complaining about it. I never minded at all. I’d seen those bikes chopped and winking with chrome, blazing with DayGlo decals, leaning in regimental order outside the milk bar, and I could lie awake wondering what it was they used to lace the shakes. When you’re twelve, the mind sails free.

There is a house in New Orleans

They call The Rising Sun.

Now I can hardly stand to hear that tune any more. Ever since I got my first ax (Ax? Do I date? Natch, it’s in the pressing of things—a hand-me-down Hohener with wires strung so high above the fretboard they made my fingers bleed) I mastered those blues chords and every desperate jam I can remember eventually degenerated into “House.” And still does. Hold down a chord. It’s why I couldn’t run away.

And then I got old enough myself to hang out at the All-Nite Milk Bar. But times had changed. When I was a kid lying in bed at night, kept awake by a rising chord, the young blades in the milk bar were switched on to
fast.
That was it. Tip it in your milk; stir it round; drink it down:
fast.
But like I said, times change. Now we were on
slow,
and we put something other in the milk. Tip it in; stir it round; drink it down:
slow.
That’s all it is, this youth culture thing. Everyone talks about semiotics and style and the endless rebellion. But all it is is cranking the lever back from
fast
to
slow,
and then in a few years some younger kids come along and throw it back on
fast.
That’s what being young is about. You want to take time and speed it up or slow it down. No, it doesn’t matter what they wear. They still powder the milk. They’re still cranking the lever.

What can I say about getting older? You’re more prepared to listen to the B-sides of old singles than the A-sides of new ones. That’s about all.

But let me tell you this: they never took “House” off the Wurlitzer in all that time, whatever changed, whatever the kids were listening to next. And that must count for something.

And it’s been the ruin of many a poor boy.

Though I’ll be the first to admit it might have been because of the legend. I mean a lot of solid, gutbucket blues got spun on that Wurlitzer before going the way of all pressed vinyl. But the legend . . . someone must have decided to keep “House” up there on the rack, and whoever it was knew about the legend.

That Wurlitzer. Now it’s lasers and CDs and circuits so small they’re only just this side of theoretical, but the Wurlitzer offered a real, emotional interface. It was a Model 1800, built to last forever in 1955 and it did what jukeboxes are supposed to do: it radiated presence. When you plugged in, electro-blue and rhinestone-red lights sparkled across a humped frame the size of a piano; silver-colored columns on the front grille featured rocket starbursts in red, while blue light splashed across the speaker screen. The effect was one of rockets bursting against a nightblue sky.

It was visual entertainment. A chrome-and-glass canopy sloped across the carousel, over the selection-strip and right down to the button bank. It let you see what was happening inside, there was no shame, you could stare right into its guts. At its head, neon tubes spelled out the word
Wurlitzer
in worms of white light. Below, a green badge-light winked on, inviting you to
Make Selection.

You dropped your coin in a chrome mouth, hit those huge white Bakelite buttons and stood back to take the pause. Then you felt a tension in the machine, before it kicked. Yes, kicked. And clicked. And whirred. And then paused again, before you’d hear the hum of the carousel turning, a chuck as your disc flipped on to the turntable, and finally five-and-a-half seconds of empty vinyl hiss before it delivered. Jangling chords. Growling vocals. The mood. You were buying a mood.

And sometimes the Wurlitzer would kick into action on its own. No coins. No selection. No one would be standing near it, everyone hard up and what little money in their jean pocket, and off it would go.

Kick. Click; whirr. Pause. Chuck, hiss . . .

There is a house in New Orleans.

This is electro-mechanical technology, remember. Overplayed discs stuck, selections sometimes got confused in an overloaded memory, your coin might go down the tube and you’d get nothing. Old Wurlitzers are only human after all. But that kicking into gear unprompted, and under its own steam, that spooked everyone. Every time. It’s how the legend got started.

I was there the night Dermott was telling everyone.

“The last time it did that, and played that same number,” Dermott pushed my elbows off the counter so he could wipe up spilled sugar with a dirty rag, “was the night Fox went from here and did you-know-what.”

It was a quiet night. Nothing had been going in the milk, and no one was in a mood to feed the jukebox. Dermott, lecherous but generous, long-suffering owner of the All-Nite Milk Bar, had been in a shit mood all evening and I was ready to go home. Then for no reason the Wurlitzer had kicked into action and played “House.”

There was Tony and Colleen and Francis and me, all too young to remember this guy Fox. Only Sleaze, himself timestuck in the era of the Teds, knew what Dermott was talking about.

“What’s you-know-what?” I asked.

“What you kids ought to do,” said Dermott. “Now all of you go, please; I’m closing early tonight.”

“I don’t know why you call this an all-nite bar,” Tony tried weakly. Dermott’s answer was to upend stools on to tables. Eric Burdon belted it out to an otherwise empty bar.

She sold my new blue jeans.

“Fox went from here, down the path and strung himself up from a tree branch,” said Sleaze. “The paper boy comes to deliver the Sundays next mornin’ and this winkle-picker taps him in the eye. He looks up and attached to this winkle-picker is Fox, hanging from a noose with his plonker out.”

“You’re making it up!” Colleen looked at Dermott for confirmation.

He shrugged. “It’s about right. And all I know is that,” jabbing a finger at the Wurlitzer, “did that, and played that. Now piss off.”

“Sure. When the song finishes.”

Outside, neon lights of the bar flickering out over his shoulder, Sleaze kickstarted his Norton. We were still talking about Fox hanging himself. “Fox was fucked up,” said Sleaze. “Dressed like a biker, full regalia, everything, but drove a Lambretta. A Lambretta with a dozen mirrors. Is that or is that fucked up?”

Sleaze tried to get Colleen to climb on behind him, even though he knew she was with me. She declined and put her arm around me; I loved her for that. Sleaze gave it hard throttle and tried to impress us with a wheelie, front of his bike rearing three feet in the air, back wheel leaving a deposit of hot tire in the middle of the road as he screeched off into the night.

Next evening we had a few beers and weighed in at the All-Nite after pub closing time. The place was heaving, and we had to stand near the bar.

“Hear about Sleaze?” asked Dermott, serving up coffee the color of engine grease.

“What about him?”

“Accident. Ran his bike off the bridge up Tuttle Hill last night.”

“Hey Col; good thing you didn’t go with him.”

Colleen shivered. “Did he hurt himself?”

“I’ll say.” Dermott laid plastic spoons on each of our four saucers. “They had to scrape him off the road with a shovel. Cremation Tuesday.”

Someone went and put a coin in the Wurlitzer.

The legend got embroidered after Sleaze died. Unprompted, the Wurlitzer would kick into gear from time to time, and though I never knew anyone involved, someone always knew someone who knew someone who died a few days later. People would stand in the bar and enumerate:
then there was Fox, then there was Sleaze, then there was Mike Sutton who went for a midnight swim in the quarry pool, and then . . .
 And so on. And always the same number on the Wurlitzer, “House of the Rising Sun.” The milk bar jinx. Bad luck even to talk about it.

Then a band called Frijid Pink produced a cover version, and it wasn’t a bad cover either; but some arsehole from the jukebox servicing company substituted it for the old Animals rendition. West Coast psychedelics imitate an English Geordie imitating a New Yorker imitating a Mississippi sharecropper: did they think we wouldn’t notice? Naw, we all said to Dermott, get the old one back. Dermott, to his credit, the old buffer—he’d fought over the years to keep the ancient Wurlitzer—got the villain to come down, and as a kind of compromise the two versions were left on adjacent selections.

Being a pair of smart-arses, me and Tony went around for a while challenging everyone to name who originally recorded “House”: none of the bastards had even heard of Josh White, so we collected every time. We even hunted down the original in seven-inch vinyl and persuaded Dermott to stick it alongside the other two.

“What the fuck for?” Dermott had no interest in history.

“It’ll make a tasty timeslip.”

“A what?”

“A timeslip,” said Tony, waving the Josh White in the air. “It’ll give people a nice confusion about what era they’re in.”

Dermott looked at us with unmitigated contempt. “Half these kids don’t know what fucking day it is, and you want to confuse ’em about the era?”

“Just put it on, Dermott.”

Truth is, it appealed to our sense of déjà vu. Naturally, déjà vu came out of the milk we drank, and we liked to replicate this by stacking the Wurlitzer with cover versions. That been-here-before feeling. It led to a lot of prototype adolescent destiny discussions. Fate. Reincarnation. Predestination. The Next World. All that.

Colleen was the worst. She was a fatalist down to her long, pinkpainted fingernails. Blinking from another milk-induced dose of déjà vu, she first came out with the pressed-vinyl model of the universe. “Yeh, and what it is, this is all a spinning disc, right, ’cos you’re just on another play, right? Another incarnation. Just another stroll down the same old spiral track right?” Colleen could stretch out this sort of thing for hours. “And death, see, that’s the hole in the middle, right, right, and you go tumbling through, waiting for your number to get punched again on the Great Big Wurlitzer.”

I know what you’re thinking. But this sort of stuff can seem meaningful when you’ve been powdering the milk.

Just then something playing on the Wurlitzer—the real one—decided to stick. Dermott, who happened to be passing, showed it the heel of his boot.

Tony, milkless and bored, yawned and said, “So what’s it mean when the record sticks?”

“That,” said Colleen, “that’s your déjà vu, right?”

“And when it jumps?” I chipped in.

“Premonitions. Seeing the future. Travel in time.”

“Scratches?”

“Moral mistakes.”

And so on. She made it all fit. Tony wished he hadn’t encouraged her.

“But the thing is,” Colleen became serious, “once you’re on, you know, your spiral path, there’s no changing it. You can’t steer it in another direction. It’s a set groove.” She looked hard into her milk.

“Bollocks,” said Tony after a pause. Then he went home.

But I was there on the night it all came to an end. It was mid-week and Dermott was talking about closing early because business was so slack. It wasn’t even ten o’clock when he wanted us to go. He didn’t look too good at all. His face was the color of putty and he was dribbling perspiration. Two huge oval sweat stains darkened his denim shirt around his armpits. We tried to give him a lot of stick and the usual banter, but he was in no mood for it. Colleen and Francis helped him collect a few coffee cups, and he seemed unusually grateful.

We were just about to leave when the Wurlitzer did its old trick.

Kick, click, whirr. Pause. Play.

Sure enough, “House” came on. Dermott marched over and crashed his boot into the jukebox before snatching out the plug wire. We all giggled nervously and ran outside. The last I saw of Dermott, he was bolting the doors behind us. And wiping perspiration from his face with a white teatowel.

The All-Nite Milk Bar never opened the next evening; nor any other evening. Dermott had had a stroke in the night. He was dead at the age of forty.

“You realize what was playing before we left?” Colleen looked searchingly at me with her brown eyes.

“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t.”

The milk bar got closed up. A few windows got poked out by kids before they boarded it over. There was some talk of it re-opening or being converted, but nothing ever happened. Its location was useless as a commercial proposition, and Dermott had only ever kept it on because he didn’t know what else to do.

The weeks went by, and Colleen and I began to spend more and more time with each other. It was going to be our last summer together, as I was preparing to go off to college. We avoided talking about it. Then her folks found some stuff in her bedroom drawer. It all got blamed on me, which was ridiculous since Colleen was always first over the edge in anything we did, and I was banned from seeing her. Her old man belted her black and blue, and threatened to bury me. Then her folks told my folks, and there was a lot of hysteria and squawking, but that was the deal, to keep the police out of it.