“Pre-show won’t hurt,” she said, and her voice was firm. “Everybody deserves a chance.”
Nomad didn’t reply, but he knew the City of Angels. It made people want things before they’d earned them. And anyway, deserve was not a word in his dictionary.
TWENTY-FOUR.
The hour passed and the sound check went on. They returned to Chappie’s, rested as True went into the den and hit his cellphone making sure all the last-minute security details were in place, they ate the dinner Chappie made for them, whoever wanted to change clothes and shower did so, and then they headed back to the Casbah. The place was overflowing. First up were the Mindfockers, six guys from the San Francisco area who delivered heavy-guitar distorto-and-vibrato-drenched head-banging rock, and after the Mindfockers’ double encores the Mad Lads got up there in front of the black leather seat cushions and the big clunky air-conditioner that looked like it was about to fall out of the wall and those four dudes laid down some serious vibe with funky guitars and a bright red Elka X-705 combo organ that made Terry salivate. The Mad Lads’ lead singer opened a music case, brought out an accordion and knocked the house down with a rollicking Cajun-peppered version of ‘In The Midnight Hour’.
It was half past the midnight hour before The Five took the stage. They started the gig with ‘Bedlam A-Go-Go’, slowed to its original tempo. By the middle of the show, when Berke did her drum solo and Terry came in on the gutsy growling Hammond to trade back and forth with her, they were a smooth and powerful engine of sonic flight, up in the orbit of the spinning spheres, way up where the music looked to the mind of the player like geometric shapes constantly changing themselves against the pure black of space, collapsing inward and reforming like a multitude of kaleidoscopes or, the best that Nomad could describe this sensation of being one with the music, as existing for a short time within a Kenner Spirograph drawing set, where you put the tip of your colored pen in a series of interlocked wheels placed on a piece of paper, and when your talent and discipline took you where you were supposed to be—with guitar, or vocals, or drums, or keyboard—again and again and again, an intricate design began to appear that was a perfect and stunning combination of both mathematics and art. After going that far into the dream, the applause and appreciation of the audience was like a call to let go and return to earth, because no one could stay at that height very long, and wanting to get up there once more was part of the drug called creativity.
They were back at Chappie’s house around three-thirty, drained of energy but satisfied—like good sex—after two encores and a version of ‘Blackout of Gretely’ that had nearly lifted the roof off the Casbah. Chappie had some cold cans of beers on hand, and passed them around as everyone sprawled, half-dead, in the living room. Terry was sitting on the sofa between Ariel and Berke, with Chappie in a wicker chair and Nomad lying on his back on the gold-colored carpet. True sat in a green chair and gratefully accepted a beer; the night had passed with no incidents, and all the agents who’d put their lives on the line for him and The Five were by now at home with their families. Except, of course, the ones in the Yukons on sentry duty out front.
He drank his beer and listened to them talk. They were tired, sure, but they were still ‘up’, as they would call it. Terry was fretting about an intro he thought he’d flubbed, and Nomad told him to forget about it. Then Nomad sat up, turned his lasers on Berke and said he thought some of the songs were still running fast, and she said he was wrong, the beat was right in the pocket. He faced her down for a few seconds, and then they both shrugged and returned to their beers and that was the end of it but the point was delivered for Berke to rethink her timing. The small talk came back up, they laughed at the recollection of the Mad Lads’ lead singer going buck wild with his accordion, and suddenly Chappie got to her feet and asked, “Anybody want a nightcap? Something a little stronger than beer?”
“Mom,” Berke said, “don’t get started on that so late.”
“What’s late? Jesus, I hardly ever see you and you’re here two nights and leaving again at…what?…ten in the morning?”
“We can stay until eleven,” True said.
“Okay, eleven then! You! Mr. Secret Agent Man. You want a Jack and Coke?”
“Um…well…”
“Coca-Cola,” she told him, in case he was that much of a stranger to the human race.
“I’ll take one,” Terry said.
“What the hell,” Berke said. She shrugged and leaned back, throwing her sneakered feet up on the coffee table and in the process kicking some magazines off to the floor. “Sign me up.”
“That’s my girl. Anybody else?”
True looked at the others in the room. They were so young. He had the sudden feeling that he was very far from home, and after this was over all of him might not want to go home. It had been, to him, an amazing night. Maybe most of it had been senseless noise and barely-controlled chaos, but still…all that youth, and passion, and life under one roof…it was eye-opening, is what it was. In his day, it would have been ‘consciousness-expanding’. If you believed in that.
“I’ll take a little drink in a shotglass, if you have one,” True decided.
“Do I have a shotglass?” Chappie grinned at him. “What color, and from which bar?”
“Mom,” Berke said. “Stop fucking around.”
“You ought to help your mother,” True told her when Chappie had gone to the kitchen. “With the drinks, I mean.” He glanced at her well-worn sneakers. “And you probably ought to take your feet off the table.”
“Oh my God!” Berke spoke with breathless mock surprise. Her eyes had widened with pretend shock. “Guys, our road manager has become our barracks sergeant! Yeah, I knew that was coming. It doesn’t bother my mom, why should it bother you?” She did recall, however, that it had bothered Floyd.
“It’s not ladylike,” True said.
Countdown to blastoff, Nomad thought. Five…four…three…two…
“Go help your mother,” True said, and this time his voice carried the hard stamp of official business. “She needs you.”
One, the loneliest number, never fell.
Berke’s face seemed frozen, her mouth partly open and her black eyes as shiny as new glass. She slowly blinked, she said, “Okay,” with a quiet that nearly blew her bandmates’ minds, and then she got up and left the room.
“‘Danger’ is your middle name, huh?” Nomad asked True.
“My middle name is Elmer,” he said, as he retrieved the magazines from the floor and put them in a neat stack back where they were, and Nomad, Ariel and Terry thought that name sounded just fine.
True finished his beer. The drinks were served from a wooden tray painted watermelon green. True’s shotglass was full to the brim and had a logo that said it was from the Funky Pirate on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. He took half of it down and did not fail to note that Chappie had opened a fresh bottle of Jack Daniels and it was on the coffee table where her daughter’s feet used to be. Berke returned to her place on the sofa with her drink, and nary a hiss was hissed nor a curse unfurled like a battleflag.
But those fucking drums would sure take a beating tomorrow night, Nomad thought as he settled in with his potion. Or…maybe not.
True came to the bottom of his glass. He was still thinking about the Casbah, and how the audience—a decent audience, an appreciative audience, not like that mob at Stone Church—had responded to The Five’s music. This was a different world. He couldn’t imagine how courageous a person would have to be, to get up for the first time on stage in front of strangers who could cut your dream to pieces. Chappie was offering him another pour, and he accepted it. They were talking about the gig tomorrow night, how they needed to tighten up here or stretch it out a little bit there—‘let it breathe’, Nomad said, as if the song were a living thing—and the talk was easy and relaxed, the conversation of people who respected each other and, it was clear, really did share a strong bond of family, of professionalism, of…honor, really.