Whale Music (3 page)

So the long and the short of it is, Claire forced herself to fall in love with the father. They married, and in a year I was born—six pounds, six ounces, about the same as my thumb weighs now—and a year after that came Danny.

Do you like earliest memories? Considering the state of my short-term retention, I find it amazing that I still possess an earliest memory, but here it is. We lived in a two-storey house on Whitman Avenue, in a town named Palomountain, California. Danny and I shared a room on the second floor (we shared this room until we were seventeen and sixteen, at which point we went
on the road
) and this one day my mother was dressing us up. It seems to me that as she did this my mother’s eyes were filled with tears, but I can’t be certain that this is part of the memory. My mother stood me on a chest of drawers and put me in a little blue suit, complete with jacket, vest and short pants. Then she set me on the ground and started working on Daniel. I was three years old, and it was certainly the first time in my life I had ever been well dressed. I immediately began to strut up and down the hallway outside our room. I was concentrating more on my style than my course, and what happened was, I tumbled down the stairs and crashed my head into the wall at the bottom. This split my head open—I still have a misshapen, rather lumpy brow—and also did something to my hearing. I suffer from tinnitus, a ringing in my ears (
ringing
might be putting too fine a point on it, it’s the
earwig equivalent of J. P. Sousa and the American Eagles), and part of my love for music, especially very loud music, is that it drowns out this strange sound inside my skull.

Danny’s earliest memory, which he recounted on many occasions, is of climbing out of his crib and crawling slowly and painfully into the living room, where the parents were having a cocktail party. My mother confirms this, even though Danny was only ten months old at the time.

A fairly early memory goes like this. One day my mother brought home a recording, placed it on the little turntable. (I was colouring a picture of Captain America,
shizzam
. Danny was playing with a Dinky toy.) The record was made by a failed country-and-western yodeller who was trying his hand at something new. The record began like this:

My mother stood with her back pressed against the living-room wall, for some reason short of breath. When the slap-bass began she wheeled into the centre of the rug, twirling about in an alarming fashion. Her skirt lifted until her underwear was plainly visible. Danny abandoned his toy truck and joined her, and those two danced (I stared at them) until the father descended from the den upstairs and broke the record over his knee. “Twaddle!” shouted the father. “That stuff will never sell. It’s got no
schnooze!”

Don’t even ask about this schnooze business. That’s just the way the father viewed music. It either had schnooze or it didn’t. Most of my stuff, according to the father, lacked schnooze in a big way.

Bill Haley has been called the father of rock and roll, and while that may not be true, he certainly got things going for us chubby white boys.

Danny and I met Bill Haley, you know. This was some time in the seventies. We were in Mexico, I forget why, but we were in a motel on the dark edge of a town, and all of a sudden Danny remembered that this is where Bill Haley lived. Danny was flying pretty high, whiskey and cocaine, a nice little combo if you care to feed your soul to intergalactic vultures. Danny got it into his mind that we must go visit Bill Haley. Dan’s then-girlfriend was about fourteen. She shrugged, assuming, I think, that Bill Haley was simply an old friend. I didn’t want to go, of course, it must have taken all of Danny’s persuasive powers to get me to Mexico in the first place, but Danny prepared some pharmaceutical concoction that encouraged socializing, and I agreed. (A recipe: cocaine, cocaine, the garrulous drug, a little mescaline to fill the night with portent, alcohol to heat my Celtic blood, to make me feel like boozing with the gobbers at the nobby. Danny and I shared a very alchemical attitude towards intoxicants.) The four of us—I had a girl with me, back then I wasn’t half so fat, and there was a rumour going about to the effect that I was a genius, which some women find attractive—piled into the rented Jeep and drove into the heart of this desert town.

Bill Haley answered the door dressed in his old cowboy yodelling clothes, a ten-gallon hat and sequined shirt. He was paunchy, the last few pearl buttons were popped open, and his belly shone in the gloom of his bungalow.

“Howdy!” Haley said. He still had the little kiss curl plastered onto his forehead. Bill Haley was blind in one eye, and that eye was cocked at nothing in particular. The good one was bloodshot and pointed at us.

Danny told him who we were, but I don’t think it meant anything to Haley. It meant something to him that we had women with us. He grinned. He still had that famous grin, like he was trying to hook the edge of his mouth over his ear. “Come on in, pardners,” he said. “Do you want something to drink?”

“That’s what we’re here for,” said Danny.

“Do you know George Jones?” demanded Haley suddenly, stopping on his way to the little coffee table that held his bottles of liquor.

“The cowboy guy, George Jones?” asked Danny.

“Yeah. That fuck.”

Danny nodded. “Sure.”

“You know that song of his, ‘She Thinks I Still Care’?”

Danny nodded, I believe his then-girlfriend even hummed a few bars.

“Well, listen to this here.” Haley stumbled over to a little hi-fi. Danny, who hadn’t had a drink in several minutes and was going through withdrawal, stumbled over to the coffee table and helped himself to the mescal. There was a little worm in the bottom of the bottle. Haley put on a forty-five and bounced the needle into the grooves. “There!” he shouted as very strange stuff started coming out of the tiny speakers. “What do you think of that shit?”

“What is it?” asked Danny. He was chewing on the worm now.

“That is me singing that song in fucking
Spanish!
It’s going to be a fucking hit!”

Danny nodded, listened to the song for a while. “Good feel,” he announced.

“Yes,” I agreed. At least, it seemed as though the band had come to a consensus regarding liquor and/or drug intake, and whatever downer they were on, they were on it each and every one.

“Spanish people have feelings, too,” announced Haley.

“Absolutely,” said Danny.

“I’m going back on the road,” Bill Haley told us. He put his arm around Danny’s girlfriend. “I’m going back to England. I’m still tops there. Biggest thing that ever hit.” Haley let his hand fall onto the girl’s chest. “There’s only one little problem, man. Rudi is
el morto.”

“Rudi Pompilli?” I asked. That was the Comets’ sax-player, the little guy who wore glasses.

“That’s the cat, Jack.” Haley took off his cowboy hat and covered his heart ceremoniously. “Chewed up by the Big C, man. And the babe never even smoked or drank or did nothing. His funeral is today, up in Chester, you know, but I said like fuck it. Fuck
it
. Because, I have got better things to do. Like, getting back into this yodelling. I could have been one of the great yodellers of all time, dig, but then this rock’n’roll stuff happened and I got side-tracked. Listen.” Bill Haley began to yodel, and he was good at it, but being a good yodeller is, I think, a little like being a good mass murderer. Haley yodelled the name Rudi over and over again.

I’ve overdone it on the coffee. My fingers are shaking so much that they miss the keys. Black clam notes tumble into the Whale Music like leaves and twigs into a pool. This is not good. To calm myself I need, for example, a Librium. Not that I have any. If a doctor in California prescribes so much as an Aspirin to Des Howl, I believe they snatch away his licence, no questions asked. Or perhaps I could do a toke or two. I seem like the kind of guy who’d have some grass or hash, don’t I? It’s just a matter of finding it.

Now, if I was me, where would I hide drugs? Taped to the underside of the toilet tank lid? Hidden in a dirty sock? In hollowed-out books? None of this sounds like me. A guy like me would leave his dope
lying around
. Probably, and this is just a wild guess, lying around on something like the living-room table.

North by northwest, into the living room, and on the table we find a little plastic bag full of twiggery and tiny lumbers. A smell of peatmoss, bogs, the scent of Lithuanian swampland. I
am
a genius. Now comes the hard part. Papers. My dope I would leave out in the open, I’ve proven this, but a fellow like me would hide his rolling papers so that he could never find them. Absolutely. I’d toss them into a kitchen drawer, bury them under a pile of salad forks and egg beaters.

An easterly furtherance, down the gold and platinum record hallway, into the kitchen.

There’s the alien Claire, preparing something that looks like food. “Hello, Claire.”

“Do you like pasta?”

This of a man who nauseates other gluttons. I ignore the question, intent on my quest. I select the biggest kitchen drawer, haul it open.

“I’ll just make a big pot anyway. If you don’t want to eat any, that’s okay.”

Salad forks, egg beaters, plastic spatulas—Fay liked a well-equipped kitchen, it gave the illusion that she could cook—and three or four automatic card shufflers. This is really a handy little device, quite the best unit that the father ever fobbed off on the public. Allow me to demonstrate. We take a deck of cards—in this case, a mixture of Tarot and Swedish nudies—we open up this little slot here … and out tumbles a pack of cigarette rolling papers. This machine works even better than I thought.

Towards Orion, back into the living room. I take a paper, toss in a few seeds and twigs, and even with my fat fingers I manage to roll a number. I stick it into my mouth and I fire up the joint. Ah. I think this is good stuff. It’s hard for me to tell, what with the way the old brain operates even on standard mode. But my fingertips have ceased twitching, always a good sign. I have become mellow, if not a total dullard. I don’t think I can work on the Whale Music now, unless I come up with something peppy. A little nose-candy, perhaps, or a
yellow-jacket, even some booze. I am not supposed to drink, of course. Many people and doctors have told me this. I even was in a hospital where everyone from the chief administrator to the janitor kept telling me I shouldn’t drink, but I say, what harm can one little sip do?

Claire comes into the living room. She is still dressed only in her panties, that appears to be her outfit, but I have grown used to it. Her belly-button reminds me for some reason of a sandbox. She holds a plate of spaghetti noodles, jumps cross-legged onto the couch, zaps the television on with the remote and begins to eat. “Plenty left, Big Guy,” she says with her mouth full.

“You know what goes good with pasta?” I ask craftily. “Wine.”

She nods. “You speak truth.”

“Why don’t you go get some wine?”

“What, like at a store?”

“A store. A liquor store. Like the one on the corner.”

“Maybe you could go?” She gesticulates at her nudity. “I don’t feel like getting dressed.”

There are several things wrong with that plan. One, my bathrobe is not exactly street-wear, either. Two, I simply don’t go outside, certainly not into the
world
, although I do flop into the pool from time to time. Three, there isn’t a liquor store owner in the state who would sell me a bottle of wine, and when you consider the morality of your average liquor store owner, that’s going some. I inform Claire of points number one and two.

“Well, okay. Just wait till I finish this.”

Hot-diggity-dog.

So I join Claire on the sofa to watch television while she eats. Actually, her spaghetti looks pretty good. I think I’ll trundle on down the hallway here, bearing by the Pleiades. Look, there’s the album
Grin
, my erstwhile masterwork, a mere fribble in comparison to the Whale Music, but all right in its way. And here’s a single, what is it, oh, “Kiss Me, Karen”, that famous
song that got everyone in the United States laid except me. You people have a lot to thank me for. When you were thirteen and getting either (a) tiny tumescent bulges or (b) budding breasts pressed into you, I bet you never even gave a thought to the pudgy seventeen-year-old who wrote the song you were dancing to. Did you know that he existed in shadowed hotel rooms? Did you know that he was already baffled and perplexed? Nothing like I am now, of course. For instance, here I am in the gold and platinum hallway, and I have no idea why. I’m pointed in this direction, so let me bravely barge on ahead. Aha! The kitchen! I must have been hungry (that’s an easy bet) so I grab a box of jelly-filleds. Now what? Listen. A faint sound. People talking with music in the background. You know what that is, don’t you? Television. If you start to talk and you hear music in the background, you’re likely on television. The television is in the living room, unless I redecorated—one time I tossed the machine into the pool—so it’s back down the gold and platinum hallway and … ah! The alien Claire. Freckled nose and breasts. She reminds me of the roller-coaster on Coney Island. I sit down beside her and aim my eyes at the television, eager to discover what is going on out there in the real world.