“No.” There’d been many stories from George’s complicated past, but not this one. Nomad wondered if he’d been saving it.
“The band was lame, just frat boys really. Bobby Apple—Bobby Koskavitch—was a skinny computer geek at Illinois, but he could belt it like a fifty-year-old black dude raised on misery. I saw him lift the gigs on his shoulders and just fly with them. Just take off, and leave the band behind. He was in some other space and time, you know?”
“Yeah.” It was what every musician longed for: the rapture when nothing in the world mattered but the sound and it carried you away with a mindrush that was better than sex with sixteen women.
“They recorded two CDs in the drummer’s basement,” George said. “Solid songs, most of them original. Had some airplay on a local station. Swapped up musicians, people came and went. Tried a horn section for a bigger sound. But that force—the stage magic—in Bobby never translated.” Not an uncommon thing, Nomad knew. If you didn’t translate to CDs or mp3s or vinyl sooner or later the road would wear you out. “I mean, they had plenty of live gigs. We were making money, and Bobby was a trooper, and we had a few nibbles from A&R dudes but no bites. Then one day…he just woke up and asked me what town he was in, and he said he was going to do the gig that night at the Armory and to pay everybody up afterward, because he was going home. I tried to talk him out of it. We all did. I said, Keep going, man. Don’t give it up. I said, You’ve got a huge talent, man. Don’t walk away from it. But, you know, he was tired. He’d hit his wall. I guess I was tired too, because I didn’t try harder. I guess I figured…really, there’s always the next band.” George took another draw from his cigarette and regarded the burning stub as if figuring it was time to kill it. “I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately. He went back to computer programming. Anti-virus shit. Probably mucho rich right now, laughing his ass off in Silicon Valley.”
“Maybe.” Nomad said, and shrugged. “Or maybe he lost his ass and wishes he was back in his old band.”
“You ever wish you were back in your old band?”
“Which one?” Nomad asked, his face impassive.
“The one that made you the happiest,” said George.
“That would be the current situation, so your question is null.”
George pulled up a pinched smile. “I didn’t realize how little it takes to make you happy.”
“This isn’t about me, or whether I’m happy or not, is it?” Nomad waited for George to speak again, but when the Little Genius did not, Nomad leaned toward him and said, “I do have eyes. I’ve got some sense. I’ve gone through enough bands to know when somebody’s got the wanders. So be brother enough to tell me the truth. Who’s making the offer?”
“Not what you think.”
“Tell me.”
A pained expression passed across George’s face. He took in the last of his cigarette, blew out gray smoke that scrolled away like a banner of mysterious calligraphy, and crushed the butt into the bricks.
“My first cousin Jeff, in Chicago,” George said, “owns a business called Audio Advances. They do the setups for auditoriums, town halls, churches…you name it. Mixing boards, effects racks, speakers, whatever they need. Plus training in how to run everything. He’s doing real well.” George stopped to watch a Harley speed past on the highway, its driver wearing a bright red helmet. “He needs a new Midwestern rep. He wants to know by ten tomorrow morning if I’m in or out.”
Nomad said nothing. He was sitting in the frozen moment, thinking that he’d had it all wrong. He was thinking that George was being hustled—courted, if you wanted to put it that way—by some other band. That the GinGins or the Austin Tribe or the Sky Walkers or any of a hundred others they’d shared a stage with had fired a manager and come to steal George away with promises of bright lights, choice weed and semi-conscious nookie.
But no, this was worse. Because it was the real world calling, not this fiction of life, and Nomad could see in George’s eyes that ten in the morning could not arrive too soon.
“Jesus.” Nomad’s tongue felt parched. “Are you giving it up?”
George kept his face averted. He stared down at the ground. Small beads of sweat had gathered at his temples in the rising heat. “What can I say?” was all he could find.
“You can say it, or not. You’re giving it up.”
“Yeah.” George nodded, just a slight lift of the chin.
“We had a good night!” It was said with force, but not with volume. Nomad was leaning closer, his face strained. He took off his sunglasses, his eyes the fierce blue of the Texas sky and intense with both anger and dismay. “Listen to me, will you? We sold some tickets last night! We rocked the house, man! Come on!”
“Yeah, we did okay,” George agreed, his face still downcast. “We sold some tickets, some CDs and some T-shirts. Made some new fans. Put on a tight show. Sure. And we’re going to do the same in Waco, and the same in Dallas. And after that, in El Paso and Tucson, and San Diego and L.A, and Phoenix and Albuquerque and everywhere else…sure, we’ll do fine. Usual fuckups and miscues, broken strings, sound problems, lights blowing out, drunks looking for a fight and jailbait looking to get laid. Sure.” And now George turned his head and looked directly into Nomad’s eyes, and Nomad wondered when it was that the Little Genius had hit his wall. On the last tour through the Southeast, when two clubs had cancelled at the last minute and they were left to scramble for gigs, to basically beg to play for gas money? Was it in that grunge-hole in Daytona Beach, under the fishnets and plastic swordfish, where drunk bikers throwing their cups of beer had brought a quick end to the show and the appearance of the cops was the opener to a collision between billyclubs and bald skulls? How about the Scumbucket’s blown tire on a freeway south of Miami, with the sick sky turning purple and the winds picking up and off in the distance a hurricane siren starting to wail? Or had it been something simple, something quiet and sudden, like a gremlin in the fusebox or the death of a microphone? A floor slick with beer and vomit? A bed with no sheets and a stained mattress? Had George’s wall been made of gray cinderblock, with sad brown waterstains on the tiles overhead and the grit of desolation on the tiles underfoot?
Maybe, just maybe, George’s wall had been human, and had been one too many A&R no-shows at the comp ticket counter.
Just maybe.
“Like I said, I’m thirty-three years old.” George’s voice was quiet and tired and small. He squinted against the sun. “My clock is ticking, John. Yours is too, if you’ll be truthful.”
“I’m not too fucking old to do what I love to do,” came the reply, like a whipstrike. “And we’ve got the video! Jesus Christ, man, we’ve got the video!”
“The video. Yeah, we’ve got that. Okay. We’ve had videos before. Tell me how this is such a magic bullet.”
Nomad felt anger twist south of his heart. He felt the blood pounding in his face. He wanted to reach out and grab George’s shirt collar and slap that blank businessman’s stare away, because he wanted his friend back. But he stayed his hand, with the greatest effort, and he said in an acid voice, “You’re the one who wanted the video the most. Have you forgotten?”
“I haven’t. It’s a good song. It’s a great song. And the video is great, too. We needed the visual, and it’s worth every cent. But I’m not sure it’s going to change the game, John. Not in the way you’re thinking.”
“Well hell, how about telling me that before we spent the two thousand dollars?”
“I can’t tell you anything you don’t already know,” George said. “Everything’s a gamble, man. You know that. Everything’s just throwing dice. So we’ve got the great song, and the great video. And I’m hoping for the best, man. You know I am. I’m hoping this tour is the one that lights the jets. But what I’m telling you now is that this is my last time out.” He paused, letting that register. When Nomad didn’t punch him or go for his throat in one of his infamous white-hot supernova explosions, which was what George had feared might happen when John heard it, George said, “I’m going to go for the rep job with my cousin. Until then, I promise—I swear to you, man, as a brother—that I will perform my duties exactly as always. I will jump when I need to jump, and I jump upon any sonofabitch who needs to be jumped. I will take care of you guys, just like always. Okay?”