The Hour of the Innocents Page 2

  “Don’t get him going on that subject,” Stosh warned. “You’ll never hear the end of it.”

  “Yeah, I’ve written some songs.”

  “I’d like to hear some.”

  Was he just trying to make me feel better? He had to know the score.

  “I’ll ask Frankie if we can play a couple next set,” I told him.

  “Bark, you don’t learn nothing,” Stosh said. He turned to Matty. “He’s like a dog that won’t learn.” Stosh wiped his bandito mustache with the back of his hand and gave me a wise-up look. “You don’t ask Frankie, Bark. You tell him. Or the shit never happens. Ever hear me ask Frankie for anything?”

  Up on the stage, Angela’s greeting scene with Frankie had turned into an argument. Stosh followed my eyes. “Never changes. It’s always the same old story with them two.” He grinned. “He needs to be more careful, though.”

  Angela stepped off the stage and marched for the door. You could see the school-hallway tough girl revive with each step, as if she’d tear off those love beads and shout curses.

  “I better head this off,” Stosh told Matty. “If she finds Tooker, they’ll light up some smoke and he won’t show for the set.”

  “Doesn’t Marlene come to the gigs anymore?” Matty asked.

  “Marlene? Not for years. Stays home with the kid.” Stosh grimaced. “I wish to hell she would come and keep Tooker straight.”

  I was surprised when Matty didn’t trail his old pal. Instead, we watched Stosh weave between the tables, fending off conversation traps, free drinks, and requests for songs. I figured that Matty wanted to talk some more, maybe to tell me himself that I was out. But he didn’t say anything. He even seemed to have forgotten his beer. He stared at the stage. The jukebox played “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay.”

  I had no way of knowing that Matty had spoken as many words as he did in a normal week.

  Trying to make conversation, I asked, “So … what was it like in Nam?”

  “Hot,” he said.

  TWO

  “No.” I stopped playing and held up my right hand. “That’s not how it goes.”

  The music petered out. Everybody was sweating and nobody was happy. But it was my song and I wanted Frankie to get it right.

  “It’s not ‘she wasn’t that special at all.’ It goes ‘she wasn’t so special at all.’”

  “What’s the difference?” They all looked at me. Frankie had a stranglehold on his bass. Stosh panted behind his drum set, as wet as if he’d been hit with a bucket of water. Matty caressed the Stratocaster he’d just bought. Smelling blood, Angela and Joyce perked up from their swoon on the couch where the warehouse employees took their workday breaks.

  Tooker had gotten the boot, not me. We were going to be an all-guitar band, with no keyboard player. When I got the call the day after Matty’s return, I expected the worst. Frankie just reminded me that practice was at four. Tooker wasn’t there when I arrived. I had no idea how the decision had been made, and Tooker’s name had not been mentioned for the last two weeks.

  I stepped up to my mike. I still felt insecure, but I was determined to get this right. “Just listen for a minute, okay? Listen to the way the line glides when you sing ‘so.’”

  Yeah, Cinderella married that handsome prince,

  But her morning-after manners made him wince.

  He soon found out that she wasn’t so special at all,

  Just another slut … who turned up at the ball.

  We’d been rehearsing for almost three hours in the warehouse behind the printing operation Frankie’s old man owned. It was miserable under the metal roof, but the warehouse was the only place where we could crank up our amps when we practiced. We’d begun by getting down “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” which had just been released that week, then we worked through some standards to carry us through the remainder of the gigs the old band had booked. Finally, we had gotten to my new song, “Glass Slipper.” It wasn’t coming together.

  When I finished singing, no one spoke. Matty tuned his high E string. He didn’t seem interested in any lyrics—just the music—but I expected a smart-ass comeback from Frankie.

  Stosh tapped his sticks on his snare rim, then said, “Well, that won’t be our first Top Forty single.”

  “Just change ‘slut’ to ‘loser’ for AM radio.”

  “Okay, Shakespeare,” Frankie told me. “‘She wasn’t so special at all.’ Written from experience, no doubt.”

  Joyce sobbed massively and ran out of the building. Angela went after her.

  “Hey, don’t take the car,” Frankie yelled.

  Angela paused at the door and said, “Assholes.”

  “What’s the matter?” Matty asked. It was the first time he’d said a word since helping each of us perfect our parts on the Stones song.

  Stosh laughed. “Joyce robbed the cradle. She probably thinks the song’s about her.”

  I was stunned. The possibility had never occurred to me. I was just trying to write with an edge, with swagger. The way my songwriting heroes did. The song wasn’t about anybody.

  “Bark reads them poems, you know that?” Frankie added.

  Matty played a riff. Loud. It was the guitar intro to my new song. Matty had changed it, shifting the syncopation to make it punchier and adding two quick notes. He stopped, then played it again.

  It infuriated me. That was my song, my riff.

  Stosh came in on the drums, alive again. It worked better Matty’s way. You could not listen to that guitar line and hold still. It was more of what I had wanted to write than what I came up with myself.

  I picked up the changes and doubled Matty on the basic riff. The music moved.

  Matty jumped the riff an octave higher, then tried a modal counterpoint. Frankie punched in the bass line and started to sing. Everything came together. It was one of those unexpected miracles that made all the frustrations and jealousies worth enduring, the reason we didn’t knock each other’s teeth out and go home.

  We played straight through to the closing verse, with Frankie faking the lyrics he hadn’t yet memorized. I had left a one-bar break for a drum fill in the middle of the last line. When we broke off the guitars and bass, we heard a car pulling out.

  “Shit,” Frankie said.

  * * *

  As I rolled up the microphone cords, I watched Matty put his new guitar away. It was a sunburst-finish Strat, nothing special, but he dried the fret board and body even more carefully than I wiped off my treasured Les Paul. He laid the instrument in its case as if soothing an infant in a crib.

  Frankie and Stosh came back from loading speakers into our van. Frankie went to the water cooler, tapped a drink, and asked, “Who’s going to Joey’s party? I need a ride.”

  “You going to leave the van here?” Stosh asked.

  “I’m not taking it to Joey’s. Shit disappears.”

  Stosh shrugged. “I’m not staying late. I got work in the morning.”

  “A ride over’s all I need. Angela’ll be there with the car. Matty?”

  “I need a shower.”

  Frankie laughed. “Soldier-boy needs a shower. Come on, man. Everybody wants to see you.”

  To my surprise, Matty turned to me. “Want to ride over with me? I’m just going to stop and get a shower.”

  “If Joyce—”

  “She’ll get over you,” Frankie said. “Sweet Jesus. She’s been fucked so many times her brains are fried. You can show Matty how to get to Joey’s new place.”

  We finished loading the van in the last slanting sunlight. By the time Matty and I got on the road to St. Clair in his car, the air rushing in the windows had started to freshen. Since coming home, Matty had bought the Strat, two Fender Twin Reverb amplifiers, and a ’62 Buick Skylark perfect for a drooling geezer who scratched his ass in public. Matty drove the back way, over a southern spur of the mountain. We passed between huge waste banks sprouting birches. Close by the roadside, a row of derelict company houses sank into the
earth. The colliery behind them had been stripped to its skeleton.

  “I need a favor,” Matty said. He spoke slowly, as if reading from a scrap of paper in bad light.

  “Sure, man. What?”

  “We should change the name of the band. Can you come up with a new name?”

  “Frankie and Stosh won’t listen to me.”

  “I’ll say it was my idea. If you just come up with the name.”

  “What’s wrong with the Destroyerz?”

  “We need a new name,” Matty said. That ended the conversation.

  Matty lived with his mother and father in a company house in St. Clair, a town shit on by history. The grid of streets on the valley floor was surrounded by silt banks and abandoned strip mines. The coal companies had gone, selling off the houses to families that had paid for them many times over in rent subtracted from a miner’s pay. Those half-a-double shanties were the county’s emblem, built by the thousands before the turn of the century, with indoor plumbing installed after the boys came home from World War II with change in their pockets.

  I knew what the layout would be before I walked through Matty’s front door: You went straight from the porch into a parlor furnished with a mock velvet sofa and chairs grouped around a console TV with the Virgin Mary on top. From the long wall, framed photos of the pope and JFK kept an eye on her. You continued through a dining room cluttered with knickknacks to the hard light of the kitchen, the family’s ground zero. The table would be chipped at one corner from a refrigerator door swung wide on Saturday nights. Upstairs, two cramped bedrooms shared a bath. A sulfurous basement held a coal furnace and boxes of Christmas decorations stacked in a corner. Tuberculosis and ghosts lurked in the walls.

  Matty’s mother was a classic, her torso a sack of coal. Even at the end of June, a black cardigan warmed a flowered blouse buttoned to the neck. Mrs. Tomczik’s graying hair was pinned to fit under a kerchief, and her cheeks had the suck that comes from discount dentures.

  She stood in the kitchen, making a pot of halupkies. She said they weren’t quite ready, then asked if we wanted to eat.

  “Where’s Pop?”

  “He isn’t come back.”

  “I’m going to get a shower and go out.”

  “You be careful, you hear me?”

  Matty started to form a word, then changed his mind. He dashed up the steps, carrying his guitar case.

  “Mrs. Tomczik? May I please have a glass of water?”

  She turned from the stove. “I like that, when a boy has good manners.” She could barely reach a glass from the cupboard. “I always taught my Matty good manners. Please and thank you. Yes, sir; no, sir. Father Stephens always said Matty was a perfect little gentleman.”

  The shower came on upstairs. Matty’s mother fumbled around her kitchen with poor-health slowness. She handed over the glass of water—no ice—and really looked at me for the first time.

  “Don’t you get hot? With your hair hanging down like that? A boy with such nice manners shouldn’t wear his hair like a girl.”

  “It’s the style,” I said. For lack of a better answer.

  “My husband don’t think it’s right. I hope my Matty won’t get ideas. My husband would go after him with the scissors.”

  I figured her husband would have to be an awfully big man to shear Matty, who looked as if he could put his fist through concrete.

  “Matty’s a grown man,” I said. “He’s been in the Army. In a war.”

  “But he had people to take care of him in the Army. Who’s going to look after him now? I just don’t want him getting in any trouble.”

  “You’re looking after him. Aren’t you?”

  She almost spoke, then didn’t. For a few seconds, she bore an uncanny resemblance to her son.

  I drank my water. I could have downed several more glasses but felt odd about asking for a refill. Mrs. Tomczik turned back to her pot of cabbage rolls, adding tomato sauce from a Mason jar.

  “Do you have any other children, Mrs. Tomczik?”

  “Matty got one older sister.”

  I was struggling to make conversation. “Does she still live around here?”

  “She’s gone.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  “She’s gone to New Jersey.”

  “Oh.”

  She turned toward me, wiping a big spoon with a dishcloth. “Tell me the truth now: Matty don’t take drugs, does he? Yous don’t give him no drugs, do yous?”

  Matty came thumping down the stairs. His hair had grown out blond since he came home. A quick toweling hadn’t quite dried it.

  “Nobody gives me drugs, Mom.” He bent and kissed her cheek.

  “You be careful. Don’t stay out too late.”

  The front door opened before we reached it. The man who came in had been tough when younger and still had a miner’s forearms, but his belly was monstrously swollen now and his face looked as though it had been scoured with dry steel wool. Matty had four or five inches on him, but they both had the same pug nose.

  “Pop,” Matty said. He kept moving, veering around his father, who grabbed at his arm and missed.

  “You were a bum. And you’re still a bum,” the older man said. “The Army didn’t do nothing for you.”

  I accidentally met his eyes. They belonged to a really good hater. I smelled liquor.

  “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your girlfriend? Isn’t that your girlfriend? I’m talking to you, boyo.”

  Matty ignored him. When the screen door clacked shut behind us, the red-faced man opened it again. “Bringing his queer friends around here,” he announced to the world. “My son—”

  Then he began to cough and couldn’t stop.

  * * *

  Joey Schaeffer’s new place was a shabby A-frame in the Lewistown Valley and, so far, one step ahead of any search warrants. The house hid in a tree line up a rutted road. A dead Volkswagen van sat in a fallow field, and the scent of manure rose from nearby farms.

  A keg of beer sat in a tub of ice by the front door, but the party was inside. Joey wasn’t big on décor, but he did have a terrific Fisher stereo system that only he was allowed to touch. Stoned, drunk, or both, women and girls danced on scuffed floorboards, with a few guys worming clumsily between them. Down a hallway, black lights turned an affectionate pair into ghouls. Most of the guests sat on cast-off sofas or cross-legged on the floor, rising now and then to share a hash pipe or joint outside—Joey’s rules said “No drugs inside the house,” a lesson he learned when his brother went to jail after spending an inheritance on lawyers. The other reason to go out to the backyard was to use the outhouse. The inside toilet had been clogged for days.

  The guy who’d cried out for “Purple Haze” the night of Matty’s homecoming coaxed me to share a bong with him up in the woods. I still couldn’t recall his name. I told him I was already too wasted. It was a lie. I wasn’t the least bit stoned, and I was even going easy on the beer. I had tried a lot of drugs, very fast, the year before, when the Summer of Love out in San Francisco turned into the Autumn of Dope across the country. At first, LSD was magic. Then it turned into black magic in the course of a trip with an unwashed girl from Philly. As for the lesser narcotics, pot or hash made music seem richer and more profound, but I didn’t like the loss of control that came with them. I wasn’t one of those musicians who function well when stoned. I took a few shallow tokes if pressed—enough to reassure people I wasn’t a narc—then sat back and watched the show.

  The Hendrix fan drifted off into the cigarette smoke. The Stones’ Aftermath LP boomed on the stereo. At the first notes of “Under My Thumb,” Angela materialized, blond hair decorating flesh bared by a scarlet tank top. She dropped onto the sofa beside me. Our shoulders touched.

  “I am soooo stoned,” she said.

  “You’re never that stoned when you say you are.”

  She thought about it. “Is that right?” she asked at last. With a giggle. I smelled her familiar scent of cheap perfume,
pot, and woman. No one else smelled quite like her. “I guess you know all about me, Mr. Rich Genius?”

  “I’ve told you: I’m not rich. We never were.” It exasperated me when the subject came up. My mother was on the verge of losing her house, and my father’s funeral bill had not been paid. “Frankie’s old man has more money than we ever did.”

  “Frankie’s fucking father…” She reached over, chose a strand of my hair, and stretched it between us. “You should come by the salon and let me trim you up.”

  Jagger sang, “Under my thumb … is a Siamese … cat … of a girl…”

  Following my thoughts, Angela said, “I’m not under anybody’s thumb.”

  “Where’s Frankie?” I asked.

  “Where do you think? Getting stoned out of his fucking mind on Joey’s Oaxacan. If he keeps going in late, his old man’s going to dock his pay, the tightwad bastard.”

  “When you leave, you need to take Joyce with you,” I told her.

  “I’m not responsible for Joyce.”

  Her tone told me they’d had a fight after leaving our rehearsal.

  “That guy she’s dancing with?” I said. “With the biker colors? He’s with the Warlocks. Him and his buddy.”

  “I didn’t come over here to talk about Joyce.” Angela rearranged herself. Our shoulders parted, then came together again. Being a little stoned flattered her. It softened the tough-girl set of her mouth and eased the sharpness of her facial bones.

  “What, then?”

  “Matty. You think Matty’s stupid. Don’t you?”

  “He’s an incredible guitarist.”

  “But you think he’s a dummy. Ain’t?”

  “I never said that.”

  “But you think it.” She reached a hand across her breasts and ruffled my hair. “I know what’s in that head of yours. We’re more alike than you think. You and your house on Mahantongo Street.”

  “I don’t live there anymore. We lived at the wrong end, anyway.”

  “You think you’re better than us. I see it. Even if the rest of them can’t figure it out. You look down on us.”

  I didn’t have to respond. Frankie burst into the room again, laughing and pushing back his long red hair. All the girls and women looked his way. The range of females drawn to him always surprised me. But it was a great quality in a front man.