“So,” Terry said with a quaver in his voice, “Does everybody hate me now?”
God, it was going to be a long tour.
The last tour, with this lineup. Maybe the last tour with any of them together, because once a band started unravelling the emperor got naked real quick.
The thing is, he was the emperor. He’d never asked to be. Never wanted to be. But he was, and that was it.
He realized, as he listened to the hum from the dashboard and felt the oppressive silence at his back, that this shit could tear the band apart before they even finished up the weekend. At best, they were in for heavy weather. What could he do right now—right this fucking minute, while it counted—to show them he was still the emperor, and that The Five was still a band until he said it was not?
He found something amid the chaos, and he latched onto it.
“Nobody hates you. I ought to, but I don’t. I guess everybody has to do what they think is right,” he said. “And I’m thinking we ought to write a new song.”
No one else spoke.
“A new song,” Nomad repeated, and he turned around to gauge the response. Berke’s eyes were closed, Mike was staring vacantly out his window, and Terry was polishing his glasses on the front of his shirt.
Only Ariel was paying attention. “What about?”
“I don’t know. Just something new.”
“What’s your idea?”
“I don’t have any ideas. I’m just saying, we ought to write a new song.”
“Hm,” Ariel said, and she frowned. “You mean pull something out of the air?”
“No.” Nomad understood Ariel’s question, because this wasn’t the way they worked. Most of the original songs The Five played—tunes like ‘The Let Down’, ‘Pain Parade’, ‘I Don’t Need Your Sympathy’, ‘Another Man’, and ‘Pale Echo’—had been written jointly by Nomad and Ariel. Terry had written a few more, both alone and with either of the two lead singers. But the way they worked was that Nomad or Ariel would come up with an idea and start kicking it around with each other, and it might go somewhere or stall and die, you never could tell about songwriting. The others would be asked their opinion, and for ideas on tempo or key, or Terry might come up with an organ motif or solo. Mike was quick to come up with an inventive bass line, and he might go through a few variations before he settled on what he wanted to offer. Berke supplied the core beat, the fills and embellishments, and sometimes she went for what was asked of her and other times she kicked it and went off in an unexpected direction. However it worked—and sometimes it was hard to say exactly how it worked—the result was another song for the set, though from beginning to end of the process might be anywhere from a couple of days to many weeks.
“Not just something out of the air,” Nomad continued. “I’d like everybody to think about it. Put our heads together.”
“Our heads?” That had brought Berke out of her sham sleep. “What do you mean, ‘everybody’?”
“I mean what I said. I think we all ought to work on a new song, together. Not just Ariel and me, but the whole band. Start with the words, maybe. Everybody does a few lines.”
Mike’s thick eyebrows jumped. “Say what?”
“We all contribute to the lyrics. Is that so hard to follow?”
“Hell yes, it is,” Mike answered. “I ain’t no poet. Never written a line in my life.”
“Me neither,” Berke said. “That’s not my job.”
“Can I speak?” George asked, and in the space that followed he went on. “I think it’s a good idea. I mean, why not at least try?”
“Yeah, I’m glad you think so,” Nomad told him, “because you ought to contribute to the song, too.”
“Me? Come on! I’m the last man in the world who could write a song!”
“Have you ever tried?”
“No, and that’s because I can’t. I know sound, but I am completely unmusical, man.”
“But like you said, why not at least try?”
Before George could respond, Berke said, “Okay, we get it.” Her voice carried a patronizing note that made Nomad think he ought to have punched her in the face a long time ago, and been done with it. “You’re looking for some way to keep us together, right? Keep our minds straight for the tour? What is this…like…busy work for the soul or something?”
“Maybe it is.” His throat felt constricted like it did when he had an allergic reaction, which was why he stayed away from all dairy. “Or maybe it’s a productive thing for people to get their heads around.”
“Good try, bro,” said Mike, “but I know my limits.”
“Yeah,” Berke agreed, “me too. And it’s not going to make me forget. Look, even if we all sat down in a circle around the campfire and wrote another ‘Kumbaya’, we’re still going to know it’s over. I mean, really. With George and Terry out, we’re not who we were anymore. Yeah, we can find another road manager and audition for a keyboard player, but…” She paused, and in that instant of hesitation Nomad thought he saw pain disturb her features like a ripple across a pond that held its secrets deep. Then it was gone, leaving Nomad with the impression that he was not the only one who’d already begun to mourn a death.
“It won’t work,” Berke said quietly, and she looked at him with what might have been sadness in those dark chocolate eyes. In contrast to that, a quick and nasty smile flashed across her mouth. Nomad thought she was torn up inside, just like himself, and she didn’t know whether to cry or curse. But Berke was Berke, and so she said, “Fuck it” before she turned her gaze away.
THREE.
For a while they didn’t seem to be anywhere, and then suddenly they were where they needed to be.
“Must be the place,” George said, as he pulled the Scumbucket and the U-Haul trailer off China Spring Road into a parking lot. They had passed through a nondescript area north of Lake Waco and the Waco regional airport surrounded by scrubby fields and scabby warehouses. He’d been directed by email from Felix Gogo to look for the red-and-yellow Delgado Cable van, and there it was, sitting next to a shiny black Toyota Land Cruiser from which the sun radiated like a blazing mirror.
“Watch out for glass,” Terry warned. Jagged bits of it glittered on the heat-cracked pavement. Not only that, but broken beer bottles lay scattered about, and one of those under a tire would not only sound like a roadside bomb in Iraq going off but might lame their ride.
“Jeez.” Berke was not impressed. “I thought we were going to a studio.”
“Well, the guy evidently knows what he’s doing.” George eased the Scumbucket up next to the pristine Land Cruiser. He could imagine the Toyota saying to his van, in snobbish car-language, Have you ever heard of something called a wash? He cut the engine, put it in Park and pulled up the handbrake, and then he sat looking at what might have been a small stripmall before a meteor the size of a freight train must’ve crashed down onto it.
Nomad was thinking that a plane had arrowed in, short of the airport’s runway. Blackened walls testified to fire. Windows were broken out and red metal roofs sagged. Here and there, on remaining sections of gray cinderblock, were the elaborate black and blue swirls of gang symbols. Looked to him as if two gangs had fought over the turf, and nobody won. But then he realized the place may never have been actually finished, because nearby stood two abandoned Port-A-Potties and beyond them, back where the thicket boiled up, were pieces of machinery that appeared to be part of a cement-mixing truck. A pile of old tires lay beside those, and a few beatup garbage cans full of burned lumber. Rags and other bits of trash hung in the brush like a hermit’s laundry.
“This can’t be it,” Nomad said, but George was already getting out. Heat from Hell’s oven rolled into the Scumbucket. And here came the hermit himself from one of the crooked doorways. He was a chunky Hispanic dude, a kid really, maybe nineteen or twenty, and he was wearing a baggy pair of brown shorts and a white T-shirt damp with sweat. His arms were crisscrossed w
ith tats and his scalp was shaved except for a black stripe going back along the middle of his head. Nomad thought they were about to get jumped by a cholo until he saw the light meter hanging on a cord around the guy’s neck.
“Hey, man,” the dude said to George. “We’re almost set up.” He motioned with a thumb toward the doorway from which he’d just emerged, and he continued to the cable company van to fish something out of the back.
“Ohhhhkay,” Mike said, mostly to himself. “Let’s do this.”
They climbed out of the Scumbucket. Sweat immediately popped from their pores. Their shadows were ebony on the bleached pavement, and as Terry, Mike and Berke followed George through the doorway Nomad stopped to wait for Ariel.
“Careful,” he told her, because the broken glass had crunched ominously under his own sneakers. Where the others had gone was in relative darkness. He felt her hand grasp his arm, to steady her path over the glittering rubble. He thought this place looked like a fucking warzone, and why they’d come here to do the interview instead of a comfortable air-conditioned studio was beyond him.
“Listen,” Ariel said, when she got up right beside him. “I like your idea about the song. I think it would be good for everybody.”
“Yeah.” He hadn’t said anymore about it since they’d been south of Waco.
She still had hold of his arm, and she was stopping him from going any further since she wanted a moment with him. “I’ve got some ideas in my notebook. Fragments, really. But maybe we can find something to start it off?”
Ariel and her notebook, Nomad thought. It was decorated with glued-on gemstones of a dozen colors. Some of her song ideas began with a single word, or a descriptive line, or a question to herself. He’d never looked inside her notebook, but he knew how she worked. He was the fiery energy of a song, the hot red anger and the will to fight. She was the ocean depths, the cool blue mysticism of the currents, the surrender to the inevitable will of the tides. He presented a snarl and a fist; she offered a smile shaded with sadness and an open hand. She was twenty-four years old, of medium height and slender build, and she’d been born in Manchester, Massachusetts, just up the coast from Boston. She wore her strawberry-blonde hair in curly ringlets that fell across her forehead and down around her shoulders like, Nomad thought, a heroine in one of those Victorian novels who is doomed to fall in love with the callous cad. She dressed in that fashion, too: lace-trimmed blouses, lacy-puffed sleeves, fine etchings of lace on the necks of her T-shirts and sewn on the cuffs of her distressed jeans. Not that he knew a whole hell of a lot about Victorian novels, but he knew he hated them from high school English.
Ariel was pretty, in that old English way. Or maybe it was Irish; the scatter of freckles across her nose and the pale cream of her skin made him think of that country the green soap was named for. She did smell nice, he couldn’t deny that. Sort of a faint honeysuckle aroma, caught sometimes when they were working close and she leaned past him. Everybody had a smell, of course. Take Berke, who smelled of friction.
But the thing that stood out particularly about Ariel Collier—leaving aside the fact that Nomad was grudgingly aware she left him in the dust on acoustic guitar, and her voice was a beautiful mezzo-soprano tessitura (which, she said, she’d learned when her parents had paid for operatic singing lessons)—was that the color of her eyes changed. Depending on the light, or her emotions, they could be gray from dove-to-dark, or show hints of sapphire blue, or sometimes display just faintly the sea-green of shallows where the reef almost touches the surface. He knew she was the baby of her family, with an older brother and sister, the former a corporate attorney in Boston and the latter a saleswoman with a yacht brokerage firm in Fort Lauderdale. Her father was an investment company executive. Her mother sold real estate. She was the baby of this family too, but she was no child to the hardships—challenges?—of the musician’s life. Neal Tapley, the leader of the band she’d been in before she joined The Five, had driven his car off a county two-lane south of Austin and launched into a stand of trees at a speed, the police later said, of a hundred and thirteen miles an hour. Which surprised everyone who followed Neal and his band The Blessed Hours because Neal was a genuinely decent guy except for some bad choices involving crack cocaine and 3rd Street loan sharks, and nobody had ever figured his old Volvo clunker could get up much over sixty.
Hell of a guitar player, Neal had been. Another world, gone down in flames.
“Yeah,” Nomad told her. “We ought to find something to start with.” But he wasn’t sure they could, and he heard his own uncertainty. He wasn’t sure it was such a good idea, after all. What was the point? But directing everybody’s mind to a new tune would give them a task to focus on, and pushing them to do what they’d never done before—a song with lyrics written by everyone, even the ones who thought they couldn’t write—might ease the feeling of dissolution that could rip any band apart. And there was another reason: Nomad hoped, deep in his heart, that with such a song that was a testament to The Five in the band’s darkest hour Terry would decide to stay, and George might find his own inner poet—however bad it turned out to be—and decide that he too was not ready to walk away.
Could, would, should…
Shit.
“Comin’ through, man,” said the tech dude. Nomad and Ariel stepped aside to let him pass carrying a coil of bright orange electrical cable, a can of Sherwin-Williams paint and a paintbrush.
“Little too late to be remodelling this dump,” Nomad said, but the guy didn’t respond on his way into the building. The darkness swallowed him up.
Nomad followed Ariel in. Once over the threshold he removed his sunglasses. The air was sweltering in here, in a rectangular room with a dirty concrete floor and gang graffiti spray-painted across every area of drywall that wasn’t punched full of holes. Or shot full of holes, because it looked like guns had been at work in here. There was no furniture. A piece of metal tubing dangled from the ceiling and hung down to the floor like the cock of a giant robot. To emphasize that image, a few used condoms were stuck to the concrete. Over in the left corner, a garbage can overflowed and on top of the mess was a Shipley’s Do-Nuts box. Good combination, Nomad thought: the tagbangers had sex first, got their blood sugar up with the doughnuts, and then finished off with a Glock orgy.
On the floor, off to the right, was a portable Honda generator mounted on a handcart. It was one of those super-quiet deals, rumbling like a cat getting scratched. Orange and yellow cables were hooked up to the generator, and snaked across the floor through another doorway about midway back and also on the right.
George appeared. “Back here, guys.”
They went through the door, watching their step on the cables, and into a smaller room that was no less defiled. The others were in there already. Many impressions crowded in on Nomad: more graffiti and bullet holes, and places where it looked as if machetes had hacked the drywall; the sunlight streamed down through several bullet holes that had punctured the roof; the rear wall had been scorched shiny black by fire, and upon it was pinned a large clean American flag; cigarette butts, crushed beer cans and other trash littered the floor, but areas had been cleared to accomodate the tripod legs of two floodlight stands, their illumination powered by the generator. The tech dude was plugging in a plastic fan on a waist-high stand with the cable he’d brought, and a second young guy with a brown beard and a suffering expression had opened the paint can and was brushing bright blood-red over the gang symbols. Two pro camcorders outfitted with lights and microphones were situated on the floor, protected from the nastiness by virtue of sitting atop their individual Delgado Cable yellow canvas bags.
“We’d better do this quick,” said the man who turned the fan’s control knob up to Fast with a thick brown hand adorned with three diamond rings. He angled the breeze up into his face. “Fucking warm in here, huh?” When no one answered, he looked at them from under his black cowboy hat and scanned them all except for George, who stood beside him. “I’m Fe
lix Gogo,” he said. “But you already know that, huh? Seen my show before?” He answered his own question. “‘Course you have. Who hasn’t? I can tell you the numbers, week-by-week. Always going up. Amazing how many people tune in, late nights. Fuckers can’t sleep, they’re all worried and shit. They can watch me, I make them happy.” He grinned, showing a blast of white teeth that had to be some dentist’s dream house. “Hey, amigos! You get happy too, huh?”
Happiness, Berke thought, was different things to different people. She saw the glint of his eyes and some accusation came at her like a bullet, and then he’d swept his gaze past her and she stared at the American flag on the flame-licked wall and wondered whose god they had offended to wind up here, on such a happy day.
Felix Gogo, whose real name—according to Ashwatthama Vallampati—was Felix Goganazaiga, was obviously not only one of the biggest Toyota dealers in central Texas and the metroplex, and not only saw himself as the central Texas and metroplex late-night cable TV show Dick Clark—check that, make it Ryan Seacrest—but he had more than a passing familiarity with the term “photoshopping”. He was about twice the width he appeared to be on his billboards. Black could not make slim he who would not lay off the enchiladas. He was maybe in his early fifties, with the same thick silver muttonchop sideburns and the silver mustache. Besides the black cowboy hat, he wore the black tuxedo jacket, the black ruffled shirt and black bolo tie with a triangular topaz clasp. On the jacket’s right lapel was an American flag pin. Topside he was camera-ready, but bottomside was casual: he was wearing a pair of khaki shorts, gray anklet socks and a pair of expensive Nikes. He had spindly legs for such a hefty dude, Mike noted. Gogo’s gut would’ve made a decent tractor tire.
“Can I ask a question?” George sounded timid in the presence of such celebrity. After all, the half-hour Felix Gogo Show had been an eleven o’clock Friday night—rerun, two-thirty Saturday afternoon—event for over ten years. It was on Delgado Cable in Austin, Temple, Waco and the metroplex. The guy had run music videos and interviewed hundreds of bands. He’d also interviewed stars such as William Shatner and Jenna Jameson, and there was still a video on YouTube of a shell-shocked Sandra Bullock watching a possibly inebriated Felix shimmy to Rod Stewart’s ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?’ back in 2002 on the studio set. There were the Gogo Dancers to keep things lively between segments. He was a showman and a character and a very rich man, and above all he seemed real happy.