“This has been tough,” Nomad answered. “About Mike and George. I don’t know if you heard, but George is going to be okay.”
“That’s good. You’ve got guts, kid. Keeping on keeping on. I wouldn’t be out here, if I was you. I’ll get my little tight ass home.”
“Would you?” Nomad asked, and blew out a long stream of cigarette smoke.
Thor didn’t respond. He just gave a small laugh and shrugged his shoulders and drank some more, and then he said in a lighter tone of voice, “I see you’re still riding with the lesbo, the geek and the hippie.”
“Still am.”
“You fix me up thirty—fuck, no—fifteen minutes with that butch babe and I’d leave her blinkin’ and thinkin’.”
“I don’t think that’ll ever happen.” Nomad listened to the Brains bleeding on the stage. He drank his beer and heard all sorts of clams coming out of those widowmakers. “Who’s with you tonight?”
“Guys you don’t know. More fucking kids. But they can’t—” and here he balled up his fist and gave Nomad a painful shot to the right arm “—keep up with the sugardaddy. It’s like fucking music kindergarten with those guys behind you. But they’ve got great hair, I’ll say that for ’em.”
“Here’s to great hair,” Nomad said, and lifted his bottle.
“Used to have it, now I buy it,” Thor said. He clinked Nomad’s bottle and drank his beer almost empty. “You want another?”
“No, I’ve still got plenty.”
“Okay.” Again Thor lifted his face toward the sun. After a moment of silence he said, “My dad passed away last December. If you ever emailed or called people who give a shit about you, I would’ve let you know.”
“I’m sorry.” Nomad had heard the stories about Maury ‘The Lighthouse’ Brightman, drawn from the memories of the son who’d tramped along with his father and mother to the hotels and clubs in the fading sunset of the Borscht Belt, the Jewish Alps, otherwise known as the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York. The Lighthouse had played such resorts as Grossinger’s, The Concord, the Friar Tuck Inn, and Kutsher’s Hotel and Country Club. His show had been called “The Boardroom”, in which he sang and did skits in the voices of Tom Jones, Ray Charles, Vic Damone, Al Martino, Jerry Vale, Sammy Davis, Jr., Billy Eckstine and Steve Lawrence, among others, ending of course with Mr. Sinatra the Chairman.
“I bought a black suit, a black tie and a white shirt at Penney’s,” Thor said. “I stood up front and sang ‘My Way’ for my father. Blasted that mother out, made the fucking walls shake. I think he would’ve liked it.”
Nomad nodded. Maury’s gift of vocal prowess to his son was Saul’s ability to speak with no accent at all, or to pull up a dirty drawl in the South or conjure a New England drone or a Midwestern nose-horn or for that matter a British street cockney or a German staccato. His voice was a citizen of the world. All you had to do to hear it was listen to his stage patter, connecting with his audiences like a hometown boy wherever he was, on the Mjöllnir Circles The Globe double album released in 1986.
John Charles recalled something this man had said to him once, after sound check in an empty Long Beach club ten years ago: You want to be like me, kid? Four ex-wives, a taste for the white lady, about sixteen ulcers in my fucking gut and debt up to my ass? You want to be like a fucking nomad wandering the desert? Okay, then, if it means so much to you…and you can take it, which is real doubtful…then you pick up that fucking guitar, you stand up there and sing me something. And you better make it good, because I am not about to let you enter my world if you’re just a fucking slacker.
“Funny,” Thor said after a while, as he looked at the world through his bottle’s amber glass. “A dream I’m having lately.”
Nomad smoked his cigarette down and tapped ashes on the red dirt.
“I can see a woman dancing in a club. All alone. And everything’s dark in there, I can’t make out her face…the color of her hair…nothing. Just occasionally a light passes behind her, so she’s like…outlined. You know.”
“Silhouetted,” Nomad offered.
“Yeah. That. So she’s dancing…slow…like she’s waiting for somebody. The music…it’s not my music. Maybe she keeps looking toward the door…expecting somebody to come in, and when they don’t she just keeps dancing, but there’s something about the way her shoulders slump, or the way she brushes her hair back from her face with one hand…that says she’s getting tired of waiting.” Thor angled his face toward the stage, where a particularly bloody B-minor chord had just been launched from the quivering strings. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think I lost my time.”
“Lost your time? Get real, man!” Nomad tried to bring up a caustic laugh, but nothing would emerge.
“I’m not talking about the so-called fucking golden days. Can’t remember half of ’em, anyway. I mean that I lost my time to find my soulmate.”
Nomad didn’t know what to say, so he stared silently across the lot at the vans and trailers that continued to pull in. A Fox News truck was among them.
“I’m incomplete, man,” said Thor. “That’s my fucking problem, right there.”
“Incomplete? What’ve you been smoking today?”
“Not anything nearly strong enough.” Thor’s eyes had again taken on a deep green shine. “Listen, Johnny. I’m serious. I think this woman in my dream is my soulmate, but I don’t know where she is. I don’t know where to go to find her. And she’s waiting for me, but she doesn’t know she’s waiting, and pretty soon…real soon now…she’s going to give up waiting because it’s been years and years…and I never came to her. Maybe I met her somewhere, but she didn’t have any flash about her, and back then it was all about the flash, and I didn’t see her for what she was so I just brushed her off. Or maybe I never met her. Maybe it’s not my music she’s dancing to in the dream, because she doesn’t even know me. Never even fucking heard of me. But my dream is telling me she’s out there, but the time I spent…the time I lost…it may be too late for me to find her before she just…goes away.”
“Soulmate,” Nomad said, and he took the last draw from his cigarette before it burned his fingers. “I never understood if you’re supposed to…like…instantly know your soulmate, or if this person—saying there is a person who fits you like that—grows on you over time, or what. I don’t even know if I believe in that or not.”
“Oh, I do,” Thor said, his face getting animated. “Absolutely. It’s your Bashert, man. The Zohar talks about it. You know, the Kabbalah. It’s like…when God makes a soul, He creates the male and female together as one, but as it enters this world it like…gets fucking ripped apart. A whole soul is the combination of male and female, those two that got torn away from each other. God Himself is supposed to bring the two halves together again. See?”