The Five (13 page)

“Sure,” Nomad said.

“You mind if I talk about this?” Mike asked, his eyes narrowed. “This is on me tonight. You mind if I talk?”

“Oh, yeah. I mean…yeah, go ahead.”

“It ain’t pretty,” Mike said.

“Well, neither are
you
,” Nomad told him, and he saw Mike give a grim smile that did not last very long but at least was there for a few seconds.

Mike smoked and thought for a little while. Then he said, “See, he covered me. I just coasted in his shadow, and nobody ever had any expectations or shit for me. He made it easy for me to slide on by. But without him bein’ around, my folks…they grieved for him, let’s put it that way. They grieved for him, and they grieved for him, and they grieved for him, and our house was a fuckin’ pit of grief, just seemed like the lightbulbs went out of the lamps one after another, and nobody put any new ones in. It wasn’t long before I was hatin’ him, and what he’d been, and I felt like they hated me, too, because I was the dumbshit brother, I was the pothead, the troublemaker, the
musician
. When they looked at me—wasn’t too often—I knew they were seein’ what was left. Wasn’t gonna be no football star in our house anymore, no smart honor roll student, and no McNeese State graduate either. No sir, that bird had flown. And I knew that I had to get away from that house and those people, so I could love Wayne like I used to. So I could think of him like a mountain holdin’ up the sky, with the clouds in his teeth. My big brother.” Mike took a drag and blew smoke from his nostrils like the exhalation of a dragon. “And he would have been the first one to tell me to go. So I went. Came back a couple of times, when I ran into trouble. But then I left one night, to get away from the hate and the hollerin’, and I got a ride on the highway with a black dude about a hundred and twenty years old, in a righteous old gold Cadillac with tailfins. He told me his name was Grover McFarland, and he was on his way to New Orleans from Montgomery, Alabama, to play in a blues festival. But he said he went by the stage name of Catfish McFarland, because he could play bass so deep he could just lie right there at the muddy bottom and grin.” Mike himself grinned at that memory. “He was a drunk, cheated at cards, had two wives at once and had shot a preacher in Pascagoula in 1959. But that sumbitch, rest his soul, was not a liar. At least not about playin’ bass.” He touched one of the guitars tattooed on his right arm. “This one was his, the best I remember it. The one he taught me on. He called her ‘Elvira, Mistress of the Darkies’.”

Mike looked up suddenly, toward the street. “You hear a car?”

Nomad listened. “No,” he decided. “She’s not back yet.”

“That girl needs a good girl to look after her,” Mike said. “Drives me crazy sometimes.”

Nomad had finished his cigarette and put it out in the cup, and he wanted to stand and stagger off to get a few hours of sleep before they loaded up to go to El Paso. Their gig wasn’t until Friday night, but they might as well get on the road and have a few days to lie around a pool somewhere. He hoped the T-shirt and CD sales had made them enough money for a friendly neighborhood Motel 6. But he didn’t go, because he felt that Mike still needed him.

“I never thought about playin’ music for a livin’,” Mike went on after a short pause to strain an ear for the car that was not there. “When I was a kid, I wanted to be a
vet
. I liked animals, I always got along with ’em. But you have to know math, chemistry…all that. I wasn’t smart enough. Even my teachers told me I wasn’t…and then the woman at the library, behind that desk, said…you’re a little boy, you’re not smart enough to read that big ol’ book. She said, go put it on the red shelf over there, and you get yourself a book you can actually
read
. And then she said… wait a minute, wait a minute…you’re Wayne Davis’s brother, aren’t you? Oh, is that book for
him
?”

Mike leaned his head forward and closed his eyes for a few seconds, and Nomad again looked away, at some invisible thing in the distance.

“It’s a good word, huh?” Mike asked. When Nomad didn’t respond, Mike said, “
Welcome
. It’s a good word.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“Good place to start, maybe.” Mike didn’t elaborate on what that meant, and Nomad didn’t want to push him. There was too much pain out here to be pushed.

At last, Nomad said, “I’d better hit it.” He waited for Mike to answer, “Okay,” before he stood up, just as a matter of courtesy.

A few steps toward the house, and Nomad turned back and said, “You don’t have to wait up. You ought to—”

“I’m fine,” came the reply. “Right where I am.”

“’Night, then,” Nomad told him.

“Mornin’,” Mike corrected.

Nomad went up the steps, opened the sliding glass door, entered the house on quiet cat feet and slid the door shut behind him, and in the backyard Mike put the cigarette between his teeth and reached for the notebook and pen.

SEVEN.

Westward went the Scumbucket and its U-Haul trailer, following I-20 across the sunburnt landscape toward El Paso.

Everybody was present and accounted for. A red pickup truck with an International Gay Rodeo Association sticker on the back window had delivered Berke to the house just after seven o’clock. She’d climbed into a sleeping bag and hadn’t budged until ten-thirty, which was why the Scumbucket hadn’t gotten on the highway until noon. But they had plenty of time, it was all good.

“Three hundred eighty-two on YouTube, four hundred and six on MySpace, four hundred and fifty-four on the webpage,” George announced, checking the video hits numbers on his cell. “It’s early, man, still early.” He was glowing today, freshly-showered and wearing his khakis and a crisp lemon-colored short-sleeved shirt. He felt like a million euros. Part of it was that he was so glad and relieved to have told everybody what his future plans were, and that they were past that, no hating going on, no name-calling or spiteful shit. Jeff in Chicago was good with the timeframe, no problem there. The Curtain Club gig had brought in three hundred dollars and change, a pretty decent haul. He felt like he wasn’t leaving them in the lurch; he felt like something solid was in the making, something that was going to take The Five to a new place. The video had been expensive, sure, but he’d heard a lot of comments about it last night, and anything that got people talking was good. Media was the key. Once you got the media interested, that was half the battle right there. Which was why he was okay with them spending money on a few days in a motel in the Paso, because they had an interview set up with the
Times
on Tuesday afternoon, six minutes on the KTSM morning show on Wednesday, a drop-in visit on KTEP’s local radio talkshow on Wednesday afternoon, and on Thursday afternoon an appearance at Freaky Frontier Comics, Books and CDs on Pebble Hills Boulevard. You had to get the media shine, had to get the people interested and the talk going. So, yeah, he thought he was going to be able to leave them in a better place than when he came aboard, and that was important for him to believe.

Terry was behind the wheel. The iPods and the Gameboys had come out, each to their own to make the time pass. Terry drew George and Nomad into a discussion of which Who rock-opera was better,
Tommy
or
Quadrophenia
, with George going for the pinball wizard and Terry and Nomad for Jimmy’s four personalities. Then they curved into talking about famous one-hit wonders, of which Berke thought the most obvious was The Knack and ‘My Sharona’, a song she remembered hearing over and over again at a bowling-alley birthday party when she was ten, about thirteen years after the song was first recorded. They realized they were getting into dangerous country, because Terry had an encylopedic knowledge of old dead bands and at any moment he could set off on a journey across what Berke called the Moldy Territory.

With eyes aflame behind his Lennon specs and passion rising in his voice, Terry would say that for sure bands like Kings Of Leon and Badly Drawn Boy and Band Of Horses were awesome, no doubt, but until you heard the Montells doing ‘You Can’t Make Me’ or the Humans’ ‘Warning’ or ‘Real Fine Lady’ by the Warlords you didn’t know the fire and fever of pure garage rock. You didn’t know what raw power could sound like in music. If you didn’t move to ‘Dinah Wants Religion’ by The Fabs, or ‘L.S.D.’ by the Pretty Things, the coffin lid might as well be closed because you were one dead motherfucker. And then Terry would get onto the subject of “the rock star”, who in his estimation could only be Phil May of the Pretty Things, and to see him in his finest sneering form there was a video of ‘L.S.D.’ on YouTube, the vid faded and gray and old and amateurish, but when Phil May in his striped Mod jacket glances past the camera and swings his long black hair away from his face and seems to chew the words to tatters before he spits them out, you know you have seen The Star.

According to Terry.

As the Scumbucket rumbled on and the air-conditioning hacked and wheezed, the highway speared straight between land colored both yellow and brown, with occasional stands of trees holding onto their faded green like desperate misers onto money, surrounded by thorn-bushes and waist-high scrub and dirt as dry as gunpowder. They passed Abilene around two-thirty. Ahead of them heatwaves shimmered and the pavement glistened like gray liquid.

“Weird bands,” the Little Genius said, introducing another round of debate.

They came up with several. Uncle Fucker, described as “psychobilly country music on crystal meth”, was Nomad’s pick. Ariel said she’d seen A Band Of Orcs play in San Francisco; they were a heavy-metal band who dressed as Lord Of The Rings-style orcs, complete with battle armor and fearsome makeup. George said he thought ArnoCorps was pretty weird; they mostly did songs based on Schwartzenegger action movies, and they dressed the part. Berke mentioned Empire Of The Sun, with their off-the-wall costumes and strange but compelling electropop warblings. Mike had his eyes closed listening to his iPod, so he had no opinion.

“The 13th Floors,” Terry said.

“We’re not talking about prehistoric,” George reminded him. “Current bands only.”

“Don’t care. The 13th Floors. And I’ll say that the 13th Floors could blow us and every band we ever heard of off any stage anywhere.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Berke said. “Moldy Territory-time.”

“Maybe.” Terry glanced back at her in the rearview mirror. “But show me another band who actually
created
their own instruments. Show me another band who came up with such awesome sounds. And then they wrote songs from them that no other band in the
world
could’ve written. Show me—”

“Show me any remaining remnant of the 13th Floors,” George interrupted, “except some warped LP in a collector’s storeroom. Maybe they’re legends, but those guys are long gone. How about we keep the discussion to
working
bands?”

Terry didn’t reply for a few seconds. Then he asked Nomad, who sat shotgun, “Would you hold the wheel a minute?” When Nomad did, Terry dug the wallet from the back pocket of his jeans. “You guys know the name Eric Gherosimini?”

“Sure,” George answered. “He was the keyboard player and front man. Flying high on acid all the time, wasn’t he? And he vanished after the band split in…I don’t know the year.”

“1968,” Terry said. “November.” He brought a many-times-folded piece of paper from his wallet, passed it back to George and then took the wheel again. “You want to read that out loud?”

As the others looked on, and even Mike opened his eyes because he sensed he was missing out on something, George quickly scanned the paper. “
Shit
,” he said quietly. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Read it.”

“
Terry
,” George read, “
I don’t have a computer out here but I went to the library in town.
I looked up your band and I
watched your videos
.
I found a CD
in a store. There’s some groovy keyboard shit on it
.
If you went to all the hassle to find me, and you
want to hear her so bad
,
come see me
.
Not the best host, I can’t put you up, but I’m
working on something real
.
Like you to hear some of it, get a young ear
.
If you’re coming from Albuquerque, follow 66 west for thirty-two miles, you’ll see a road on the right with a sign to
—” He blinked and looked up. “These are directions to Eric Gherosimini’s
house
?”

“You got it. He signed at the bottom, didn’t he?”

“I’m not following this,” Ariel said. “Who are we talking about?”

“The 13th Floors were—” George began, but Terry stepped on him: “
I’ll
tell it.”

Terry reached a hand back and waited for George to return the letter. Then he said, “The 13th Floors were together from 1965 to 1968. They did three LPs on the Polydor label and had a couple of singles that sold okay but didn’t set the world on fire. If you can find those LPs now, and they’re in good shape, you could make a lot of money. The 13th Floors did experimental rock, acid rock I guess you’d call it. They used weird effects, wrote off-the-wall lyrics and they made instruments out of things like gourds and metal pipes. Eric Gherosimini played a Rhodes piano, a Vox organ and a Mellotron, and he was always tinkering with them, taking them apart, rebuilding them, putting them together with parts from other keyboards. But George is right…the band played stoned most of the time. They were heavy acid hitters. It got to where they were hard to work with. They dropped gigs left and right. Their drummer jumped out the window of a Holiday Inn in Bathesda, Maryland—”

“Go, drummer!” said Berke, with a fist pump.

“—and he landed on a woman in the swimming pool and broke her back, and that was about the end of their road. They split and just merged with the giant whirlpool, man. Just got sucked down the drain, and gone.” Terry shrugged. “But their stuff started showing up as samples in the ’80s. Record collectors shot their LP prices up. A few critics who’d never heard of them got interested, and all of a sudden they were ranked with Procul Harum, Cream, The Doors…bands like those. Only stranger. Somebody found a fragment of a home movie in color of them doing a gig in Oakland in ’68, a couple of months before the breakup…and on it, Eric Gherosimini was playing a white keyboard that nobody could identify. Vox? No. Rhodes? Mellotron? No. Too bad the fragment had no sound. But I think it must have been a keyboard he’d built from pieces of other instruments. I’d heard about it, it was kind of a rumor that floated in and out among the LP collectors. The keyboard was never on any record, there’s no evidence it was ever used in any gig other than Oakland. But he had a name for it. Or, a name for ‘her’, I mean. Lady Frankenstein.”

“Wait a minute, hold on!” George said. “If this is really the guy, how’d
you
find him?”

“Last year I was talking with one of my piano students at the Episcopal Center. We were just shooting the bull, and we started talking about old bands. This guy’s only twenty, but he knows his retro. So he asks if I’ve ever heard of this band and that band…and I say yeah, yeah, and then he hits me with the fact that his
grandfather
was a roadie out on the West Coast in the mid- to late-sixties, that’s how he got his interest. Then he hits me with the fact that Grandpa was not only a roadie, but was selling magic mushrooms, hash, acid and whatever to the bands he was working with. This dude was like…their Doctor Feelgood, man. So Grandson says Grandpa got busted in ’67 getting high with a guy named Nate Cleave, that they were good buddies and they still kept in touch.” Terry saw by the gas gauge that they’d better start looking for a station, because the needle hovered just above the E.

“Nate Cleave was the bass player for the 13th Floors,” Terry continued. “Now he’s Dr. Nathan Cleave, a professor of Astronomy at the University of Florida. I didn’t find that out until later, but I figured I could start with Grandpa. I pleaded my case with Cleave, told him why I was so interested, and he said he knew where Eric Gherosimini was but the dude was a hermit, he didn’t want visitors. Didn’t have the Internet, didn’t have a cellphone. Finally he said he’d write him for me. Snail mail, to a post office box. It took a few months, but back in May I got that letter. Inviting me to come see him.
Me
.” Some emotion got in his throat and tightened it up. “Man, this is like the Holy Grail to a keyboard player. One of the greatest acid rock keyboard players
ever
is inviting me to come see an instrument he created. It’s like.. the legend of legends. That’s why I’ve got to go. I’ve got to go see it for myself.”

“Okay, I get that,” Nomad said. “But what’s so special about it?”

“It sings like a woman’s voice,” Terry answered. “And more than that. Dr. Cleave says it was built to be like…a mood ring of instruments. Says somehow Gherosimini engineered life into it, that the tones change depending on your mood, on the state of your mind. He says it spooked everybody out, but the few times he heard it played no two people could get the same sound from it. And we’re talking early tech, guys. Like primitive, before the big synthesizers that came along. I want to hear it. Just hear it, that’s all.”

A silence fell. The Five was scheduled for a gig at Staind Glass in Albuquerque on Saturday, the ninth of August. George figured, as he knew Terry already had, that if this visit to Eric Gherosimini was going to happen, it would probably be the following day, Sunday the tenth. And then Ariel broke the silence by saying, “I don’t think that’s all, Terry. I think that more than anything, you want to play it.”

Terry nodded. “Yeah,” he replied quietly. “That would be the truth.” He saw a Shell gas station over on the right, at the next exit. “Gas time,” he said, and took the ramp. As he left the highway, he noted in the sideview mirror that the dark blue pickup that had been behind them for many miles also took the exit. Terry turned again to the right at the end of the offramp; the pickup turned to the left, and drove away across the overpass.

“Get me somethin’ to eat,” Mike said, stretching forward so his back cracked. He had removed his earbuds and had heard most of Terry’s story. “Terry,” he said as the Scumbucket pulled up to the pumps under a yellow plastic sunshade, “it’s been a long time since ’68. I hope Lady Frankenstein don’t turn out to be a snaggle-toothed hag that couldn’t hum for her supper, bro.”

Terry didn’t respond; he was thinking of something Dr. Cleave had told him over the telephone, in one of their early conversations:
I’ll have to caution you that sometimes
the past is best left alone. But…if you really want me to write him…if you really do…I will
.

It was time for bathroom breaks and for getting replenished with soft drinks or coffee, candy bars, popcorn or whatever was available in the station’s store. The place was painted yellow with red trim around the windows. Out in front was an ice machine and next to it a gizmo with a hose and nozzle to dispense air for fifty cents. Written on the plate-glass window in white soap-chalk were prices for sixpacks of various beer brands, liters of Coke and quarts of motor oil. There was a stack of tires for sale, though there was no garage facility. George had the credit card they used for gas, so he started pumping while the others stretched their legs, used the bathrooms around back or went in to buy something.