Whale Music

There is a toe sticking out from underneath a green blanket on my living-room sofa. A lovely toe, a pale and dainty toe. A toe that has never tested dirty bathwater. I am fond of pretty toes like this, because my own are so ugly. My big toes are huge and flat like ping-pong paddles. The rest are deformed midget toes, little squirmy grub toes. The nails are hard and horny and for some reason have turned bright yellow.

Apparently I’ve received a visitor. This strikes me as highly unlikely. Oh, certainly, people come to see me from time to time—executives from Galaxy Records, reporters from magazines, my mother on a weekly raid-and-pillage—but this is some form of
house guest
, because the owner of this toe has decided to spend the night! I don’t know how I feel about this.

Into the backyard then, for a refreshing dip in the pool.

Let me see how large a splash I can make. Immense, a monster. This is not just my weight—that helps, but size alone does not ensure a fine splash—it is a matter of maximizing surface contact, making sure every available square inch of naked pale flesh slaps the water simultaneously. Danny was great at this, which proves that size is nothing, because Danny never achieved my proportions, although towards the end my brother was quite corpulent and bloated.

We were all of us born too late, that’s a sad fact. This age is a strange new neighbourhood, cheaply constructed and stuck out in the middle of nowhere. None of us belongs. Daniel should have been a medieval warlord. Dan-Dan should have wandered throughout the barren earthworks, a butt of malmsey in his paw, tweaking the bosoms of handmaids, shooting the boots to the snivelling turnspits. When he passed out in the shadowed hallway, there would be minions aplenty to haul his carcass off to bed.

My brain is a little leguminous, I make no bones about it. Indeed, I worked hard for this brain, put in the years and squandered millions. So, let me just ask, what’s this about a toe? A pale, dainty one poking out from beneath a green blanket? I see. This is impossible, people do not come to visit me. Sometimes record executives (even President and Chairman of the Board Kenny Sexstone himself, the bizarre, puppetlike creature), magazine people or fraudulent psychiatrists knock on the door, but I pretend I’m not home. I hide behind something and wait for them to go away. My mother doesn’t fall for this, she unlocks the door (as many keys as I come up with, she comes up with more) and barges in. My mother makes vague inquiries as to my health, she sticks her hand between the cushions on the sofa and ferrets out uncashed cheques. Ergo, this alleged toe on the sofa couldn’t belong to a visitor, because I would not have opened the door. It could not be my mother’s, because my mother’s nail is always painted a garish red. I probably imagined this toe on the sofa, it is too unlikely a thing. But, if you insist, I will go back to the living room and take one more gander.

Ah, here we are in the music room.

Look at all this equipment! I have synthesizers and recording modules, mixing boards and otherworldly musical machines, everything interfaced with a Macintosh computer. I’m pretty sure that I could get the house to lift off if I tried hard
enough. The world is going down in flames, it is a flushing conflagration, but technology has kept pace. Do you see that over in the corner? That hulking assemblage of wires, circuit boards, plastic and wood? That is the Yamaha 666, the most advanced keyboard system ever invented. Tread softly, we don’t want to wake it.

I love Science. Look at the astounding toys it’s produced, consider the wonders of pharmaceuticals. The future has arrived, as promised in those little films they showed us in grade school. You remember those, don’t you? The film would slip off the take-up reel, before long celluloid would be roiling about the floor, your teacher would panic and start screaming for the A.V. man.

I must work on the Whale Music. The Whale Music is very important to me. It’s the
only
thing that’s important to me. Don’t try to stop me from working on it like Mom and Fay and Kenny Sexstone and countless record executives have tried to do. The record execs say the Whale Music isn’t commercial. I say it’s not my fault if whales don’t have any money.

A low note on the pianoforte machine. Don’t you love low notes? Don’t they tingle in your privates and send electrical juice spurting to your brain? Of course they do. And now rhythms, layered as the sea, slow and powerful near the bottom, clear and sparkly on top, whitecaps catching the sun. I need, I need—I need a saxophone! Do you play the sax? I need, it is absolutely imperative that I have, a sax—a
soprano
sax—to do the dolphins. I never learned how to play the sax, a costly oversight. What I must do is hire Mooky Saunders, unless he’s dead.

Into the living room, then, to use a telephone, although I have a nagging suspicion that I don’t own this instrument of torture. Still, there’s no harm in checking.

Do you see what I see? Toes, five of them, attached to a foot, a pale ankle, a calf, a slender calf, a calf that has romped through clover in Switzerland. This is a very strange thing to be poking
out from underneath a green blanket on my living room sofa. This is some form of intruder. What could they be after? Despite popular belief and overwhelming evidence, I am not paranoid. At least, I don’t believe that anyone is trying to kill me. My friend John Lennon was assassinated, but I cannot imagine someone doing that to me. What would be the point, other than a bravura display of mental imbalance one-upmanship?

Wait a moment. I suppose there’s some chance, a slim one but a chance all the same, that I’ve killed someone. Oh my goodness, I hope not. I may have killed a record executive or magazine reporter, one of the main reasons I don’t let them through the front door. I may have strangled them, or smothered them within the foul-smelling folds of my body, then covered the corpse with this green blanket.

All is well, because the form underneath the green blanket just moved. Now it’s rolling, and the green blanket is falling away to reveal … nakedness.

Into the backyard, into the pool. Look how big a splash I can make! Colossal, improbable.

It was Danny who taught me the technique. He was seven, I was eight, when the father had a pool put into the backyard on Whitman Avenue. The father had made a bit of money from a song called “Vivian in Velvet”, which you might remember if you’re quite old and have ridiculously bad taste in music. My mother had wanted the pool, apparently as a backdrop to her tanning activities. The first thing Danny did, as soon as the pool was full of water, was announce that he was going to produce the most humungous of splashes. He spent quite a few minutes telling me the technique involved. “You don’t gotta run,” he pointed out. “Running is for shits. Two, three steps maximum, and then you got to lay your body
over
the water and drop. Think
down
. Try to get as much of your body to hit as you can. Now, I’m gonna go first. Watch me.” Danny took two determined steps towards the deep end and stretched into the
air. As he hit the water he produced a beautiful thing, liquid pyrotechnics. Then it occurred to me that Danny didn’t know how to swim. I managed to fish him out with the handle of the skimming net.

My house is high on a cliff, and from the edge of my property, pressed against the fence (barbed wire running along the top, eight feet in the air), I can see the ocean. From time to time I will spy a pod of whales. They swim around the world, you know, whales circle the globe purposefully. They lunch off the Isles of Scilly, stop for idle chatter near Monrovia. I feel very fortunate to see a pod—a
family—
sail by in the water beneath me. I love to see that. What I don’t love to see is a naked body on my living room couch. It is a female body, by the way. What am I to do?

Into the music room. I rewind the tape on the console, blast the song into the world octaphonically. Yes, yes! This is lovely and I must dance to the
Whale Music
. I throw off my bathrobe into one of the dark corners. I sing the “Song of Flight.” The dolphins leap through waves, they swim through sunlight, and now I remember, what this needs is a saxophone. I’m going to phone Mooky Saunders, unless (a) Mooky is dead or (b) I don’t own a telephone. So it’s into the living room for a look-see.

Oh. Er. Um. There is a naked girl sleeping on my couch. She appears to be no older than fifteen—extremely bad legal news—and she is snoring lightly. Her hair is a golden colour, and it spills around her, it cascades onto the floor. I will cover her with the green blanket, which has likewise tumbled onto the living-room rug.