Whale Music (4 page)

“Good,” I say, nodding at the screen. “You’re watching ‘Love Mountain’, my favourite.”

I’m pleased to see that not much new has happened in the real world. It’s true that the program only informs me about the town of Love Mountain, Colorado, but if there was widespread annihilation or nuclear holocaust, Peter Mandrake, Cindy Winston, Kingsley Charlesworth and all those, they’d mention it, wouldn’t they? Today Kingsley Charlesworth seems to be blackmailing Cindy about something. I am not sure what, but this is all right, Cindy seems unclear herself and even Kingsley is vague. Claire emits a series of small barks, what they must use for laughter in her neck of the galactic woods.

Claire is through her spaghetti. She pulls on a pair of bluejeans and a very strange blue sweatshirt with a big leaf on
it. The Toronto Maple Leafs, her sweatshirt announces. Claire is number twenty-one of the Toronto Maple Leafs. “So …” Claire does a little patty-cake on her thighs. “You got any money?”

I knew there’d be a catch. I’m fabulously wealthy, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I can lay my hands on any actual money. “Well,” I say, “take a look around. Check up in my bedroom.”

“Okee-dokee.” Claire flies up the stairs. They must be very energetic on Toronto. I watch Peter Mandrake. The man is a swine, he doesn’t deserve the love of a woman so pure as Gail Gaynor, but that’s the way things work out there in the real world. Besides, he is not so big a swine as Farley O’Keefe.

Claire is back. “I found about three thousand dollars.”

“Buy
two
bottles of wine. And, um … say, do you like whiskey?”

Claire shrugs. “It’s okay.”

“Then by all means buy a magnum! Buy a jeroboam! Buy anything else you want. Buy more doughnuts, these are slightly stale. Buy me some cheeseburgers. Buy me a penny-whistle that can play in B-flat. Buy yourself some Earth clothes, number twenty-one. Buy some floppy disks for my computer. Buy an automatic card shuffler, what wonderful machines they are. Buy me a telephone—”

Claire interrupts. “You got a telephone. It was just unplugged.”

“Of course it was unplugged. What good would it be if it wasn’t unplugged? And buy me a Mars bar.”

Claire is giggling again, which has the effect of making her long golden hair dance. It is a very lovely sound, Claire’s giggling, and gives me an idea. I stand up, flee into the music room. For this I must power-on the Yamaha 666, which I do with great trepidation. The Yamaha 666 is so advanced a keyboard that even Stevie Wonder and I have problems with it. I call it the Beast. Once I get it juiced-up it screams, the Beast
must be fed a handful of microchips and talked to softly. Finally it quiets. I start to combine frequencies and after some trial and error approximate the sound of Claire’s giggling. I fly into the percussion booth and paint background, a dreary, sludging rhythm, monotonous whoppings on a marching bass drum. This is going well. It needs something, though, it needs a
trumpet
, which fortunately I know how to play. I lick my lips clean of icing sugar and blow. A melody pops out into the air, and it wants to be wrapped in soft chord structure. Back to the Yamaha 666. The readjustments make it howl, but then it is tamed, I am coaxing out soft major sevenths. Major sevenths make the bottoms of my feet itch, this is why I love them so much. This is good, this is a ballad, this needs words! I bolt into the control room, create about a baseball stadium’s worth of echo, and then it’s into the vocal booth. I put on the headphones and begin to sing.
“Claire, the way the sunlight bounces in you hair …”

At one point I decide to take a refreshing dip in the pool. It i night, the sky is spotted with starlight. I look up for a long time searching for Claire’s home.

I wonder if the world of Toronto evolved in a sensible way It’s inconceivable that all planets are like this place. Sometime my confusion is such that my tummy will twist like a pretze my brain will grow fur and burrow into the dirt. I must accept some responsibility—I overindulged on the pharmaceutical front, I drank deeply of the rotgut of life—but I really don think it’s all my fault. The randomness of our world mind-boggling. In my case the boggle is audible, I walk aroun with a ringing in my ears, a warning bell, a siren,
mayda mayday
.

This love business, for example, is prickly as a porcupin Even Babboo Nass Fazoo backed away from that subject. He bandied the word about quite a bit, plucking a flower, wafting it beneath the shrivelled mushroom he used for a nose, proud
exclaiming in that squeaky little voice of his, “Now, I am luffink diz floor, but is de floor luffink me?” I’ve come to my own conclusions. My mother didn’t fall in love with my father, she fell in love with his P. T. Barnumisms. My father fell in love with a mannequin. My brother Danny fell in love with hundreds of women, all of whom took some piece of his heart away when they left. I fell in love with Fay, who went through life like a bowling ball.

Bowling was the one thing, as a youngster, that I could do better than my brother Daniel. If you could have seen the ten-year-old Desmond, you would understand. I was a born bowler. I was shaped like an avocado, which gave me the requisite centre of gravity. My arms were segmented with baby fat, giving me some strength and shock absorption for the joints. The feet, flat and wide, lent me stability and balance. And, most important, there was the dullness of the activity. How perfect.

Danny was good, though, powerful and keen-eyed. His delivery was flamboyant where mine was workmanlike. Dan-Dan threw the balls with a huge left-handed hook that often threatened to topple them into the gutters. But they would always at the last moment break away from that edge, catch that one-pin and send it reeling backwards.

Dan-Dan shot more strikes than I did, but he lacked finesse. I picked up more spares. And Dan-Dan went for the seven-ten splits.

Do you bowl? Do you know what I’m talking about? The deadly seven-ten split, where the corner pins are left standing on each side of the lane. Most people do what I did, take out one or the other with a slow, easy mow. Danny would attempt to catch the ten just to its right, to send it flying across the wood and into the seven.

It was next to impossible. He never made it.

God, I loved my brother Danny.

The father decided that Danny and I needed music lessons, and we started out on the accordion—or, as Danny called it, the titty-tickler. The father thought the accordion was a wonderful instrument, redolent of schnooze, and I have to admit it’s got a lot going for it. It’s not particularly hip (except if you wander away outside with the thing, playing a sort of jazz that would bewilder Ornette Coleman) and the number of accordion groupies worldwide is probably only about seven, and an ugly, dwarfish assortment they are. Still, it teaches one a lot about music, the accordion does, what with the right hand learning how to work a keyboard, the left hand busy as a beaver on those mystery buttons. Actually, you know, the buttons produce chords, so right there you have lead and rhythm, and the accordion is a handy thing to write songs on. Also, on
A World of Heaven
(two and half mill worldwide, they listened to that one in Paso de los Toros) there is an accordion solo. But here’s a secret: that’s not me playing, like everyone assumes. That’s Danny.

Our teacher was an old man named Hermann Gerhardt. Danny identified him as an escaped war criminal and accused him of various atrocities including eating dead babies, but basically Dan was very fond of the guy. Hermann Gerhardt was slightly humpbacked and wore his trousers pulled up to just below the nipples. He had spectacles, but one of the lenses was blackened. Sometimes the glasses would slip over the
bumps of his nose and we could see a yellow eye floating there, wet and fishlike.

We were very good students, Danny and I. Myself, let’s not make too big a point of it, I was by way of being a child prodigy. Music simply became my language, probably because whenever I attempted to communicate in my mother tongue the father would make me feel like I’d said something stupid.

I practised constantly, sitting on my bed and drawing out all those lush Italian melodies. It didn’t take long before I’d figured out the system of music, how sensible and mathematical it all was. People claim that I can play any musical instrument (which isn’t true, I can’t play the saxophone, is Mooky Saunders dead or what?) but once you’ve glommed on to what’s happening, it’s a simple matter to reason out how any particular fretboard or twisted piece of tubing works. A piano keyboard is, to me, a beautiful thing, the doorway to an orderly and rational universe. I can slip through when baffled by this sorry world we live in.

Danny never spotted the doorway. He was always more than happy to jump into whatever shitpiles littered his path. But he was an excellent accordion player, and here’s the reason—more than almost any other musical instrument, the accordion is a
machine
. It’s a contraption. It has to be pumped, the mystery buttons have to be depressed, and it’s only as a sort of afterthought that your fingers stumble up and down the keyboard and force out schnoozy melodies. Danny figured out the mechanics of the accordion, but was forever baffled by the mechanics of music. Still, he was Hermann Gerhardt’s pride and joy, even when, at his first recital, Danny pretended that every in-squeeze of the bellows was pinching his nipple. Dan didn’t allow the music to be interfered with, but over and over again he would screw up his face and silently howl with pain. The audience, four or five sets of parents, stirred nervously in their fold-up chairs. I watched Mr. Gerhardt. He was laughing so hard that tears came even from his yellow, fishlike blind eye.

Of course, the father was very excited that he’d produced a
musical genius (Danny, that is—the father thought I was no more than competent) and he forced Danny to practise all the time. Danny’s chief interest in those days, however, was the Los Angeles Dodgers, recently transplanted from distant Brooklyn, and between that and my father’s badgering he lost all interest in the accordion. That was the first bad blood between those two. I tried to cheer my father up by practising very hard and achieving a level of excellence on the accordion, but he was not to be cheered. He didn’t even notice when I played a piece called “My Dad,” one I’d written especially for him. Granted, the melody was rather derivative, and the tune likely sounded like any one of a thousand schnoozy ditties, but all the father did was note in a disinterested way that my left hand was getting lazy. My mother liked the tune, it set her to dancing in the living room, so I changed the title to “My Mom” and never played it again.

Danny became a very good minor-league baseball player, the captain of his team of nine-year-olds, the winners of regional championships. The father decided that he’d sired another Ty Cobb. He bought himself an oversized glove and demanded that he and Danny spend long hours practising hitting and put-outs. Dan-Dan soon realized that practice with a fat and clumsy man could only erode his skills. Daniel abandoned baseball altogether.

So I decided to become a good baseball player. Danny decided to become a hoodlum. I never achieved my goal. In my entire little-league career I had only one at-bat, the coach putting me in out of desperation, and although I did manage to get on base (hit by pitch), I was lifted in favour of a pinch-runner. Danny, on the other hand, became a very good little hoodlum.

Danny discovered the great love of his life, speed. Not the pharmaceutical variety (although he was to develop a powerful fondness for that), but velocity and fleetness. Our home town of Palomountain nestled in some pretty ambitious foothills, the streets went up and down like a roller-coaster, and Danny took
to finding anything with wheels and hurtling down the declines. When his rusty bicycle proved unworthy of the exercise he stole better ones, when he got bored with that he helped himself to go-carts and soap-box jalopies, and when that was no longer boiling his blood he got extremely ambitious and stole a car. That was when he was thirteen years old, and, although he tried to look older by donning sunglasses and smoking cigarettes, the local police soon became aware that a small child was bombing around town in a great big black Studebaker, and they shut him down.

Danny had to go to reform school for a year.

That was kind of a watershed year for the Howell family.

Let’s review the pristine American upbringing, let’s look at this childhood painted by Normie Rockwell. Here we see the Howells at dinner: the father, the mother, Danny and Desmond. What are they eating? No one knows. It was cooked by the mother, and she has the best insight, but she identifies all of her dishes with a kind of crippled continental French that the boys have long since given up trying to decipher. The father doesn’t care what it is. The father eats with fork and spoon. Apparently he never mastered the knife, the knife is beyond him, the whole concept of knife goes over the father’s flat, brush-cutted head.

Daniel picks at the meal. Desmond devours with gusto.

“This is good,” Danny offers. “It tastes like in a restaurant.”