The Hour of the Innocents Page 25

  But not my brothers of the wild heart,

  They had no sense of how far they could go …

  Some died quick, while others … faded slow …

  A gorgeous cry, Matty’s guitar solo set up the closing verse:

  I can see them young and whole,

  Children playing out their roles,

  The road to heaven leads some children wrong …

  But I remain to hold them near,

  I take them with me … through the years …

  The road to heaven leads us on and on …

  Matty had risen, positioning himself at the backup mike to add a high, ghostly harmony to the final chorus:

  I knew how to stop. And start.

  But not my brothers of the wild heart …

  They shook their fists at lightning, and they burned …

  Leaving me the lessons … no one learned …

  They … never learned …

  The song ended with a drumstick touched, lightly, to the crown of a cymbal, our coalcracker version of a Zen gong.

  When he sensed that the tape was clear, Stosh said, “Fucking good, Frankie. Really fucking good.”

  * * *

  “I don’t like it,” Danny Luegner said. “It doesn’t showcase Frankie’s voice.”

  Uninvited—unless by Frankie—he had slipped into the control booth during the recording. He looked more like Pan than ever, or a nasty little satyr.

  “It’s too … what’s the word I want? It’s one of your college words, Will, help me out. It’s too introspective. That’s what I wanted to say. You need to give Frankie a big, sweeping melody, something to show him off. A song with big emotions, with serious feelings.”

  I struggled to keep my temper. Everything had been going just fine.

  “I wrote a ballad for Frankie. Exactly what you asked for. It just doesn’t belong on this demo.”

  “Now, now, that’s not quite true, Will,” Luegner said. “Frankie sang me that other song of yours—I’m assuming it’s the same one, that one about nighttime in the palace or whatever it was. You can’t write songs like that. It’s too dirty.”

  “Dirty?”

  “Explicit. You can’t write about women taking off their clothes and wrapping themselves in sheets and going to bed with somebody. There’s no future in songs like that, no money.” He shook his head mournfully. “Now, I’m not saying you’re not a talented young man, Will. But songwriting’s an art. Maybe you need a little time, maybe broaden your listening horizons.”

  Nobody defended me or the songs. The engineer stayed out of it, turning off the preamps for the night and lighting a cigarette.

  “Audiences love the songs,” I said. “Eclecta Records is anxious to hear our tape.”

  “Now that’s something else I want to talk to you boys about. I’d like you to give me a fair chance, no more than that. Just a fair chance. Before you send the tape to Eclecta, I’d like to run it by my friend at Capitol.”

  “Who do you know at Capitol Records?” I asked him again.

  “Look, Will … it’s my job to take worries of that kind off your shoulders. That’s what a manager does, he handles the business end, so artists like you and your friends here can concentrate on making music.”

  He put his hand on my shoulder. I didn’t want to brush it off and make a scene.

  “I’m not saying you shouldn’t run it by Eclecta, too. But that’s a small-time outfit, hits or no hits. The label’s a flash in the pan. You talk Capitol, now, you’re talking a big company, a corporation. And a big corporation means big money, fellas. Just give me first crack at landing you an offer. Then we can see what kind of deal Eclecta has in mind. Fair’s fair.”

  “That’s fair, Will,” Frankie said.

  “I promised Eclecta I’d send up the tape right away.”

  “So take it to your friend Milt Ehrlich in person,” Luegner told me. “You can give it to him when you play the Fillmore East. I guarantee you I’ll have it back in plenty of time. You can go onstage, knock ’em dead, then hand Milt the tape.” He cocked his head and teased his chin with his fingers, the high school play gesture for a man thinking deeply. “Who knows? Maybe some other serious labels will hear you in New York? Columbia? Or Warner Brothers? Maybe you won’t need me, maybe I won’t have a chance to manage you boys, after all. So just give me a shot and let me show you what I can do in the meantime.”

  “Capitol Records doesn’t have an office in Philadelphia. I checked.”

  “Come on now, Will. You think I live on a leash tied to William Penn’s ankles? I wouldn’t have survived as a manager all these years if I didn’t think a lot bigger than just Philly. I don’t know why you’re so suspicious of me, young Mr. Cross. I wish I could reassure you somehow. But I guess Milt Ehrlich’s been whispering in your ear, he’s like that. All I’m asking is that you do what’s right for the whole band, like we all agreed.”

  He turned toward Stosh and Matty. “Speaking of which, I keep my promises. I said I’d land you boys a serious club job or two, some serious-money work, and I’ve already got the first one lined up. And you don’t have to pay me one dime in commission, this is all in good faith.”

  Frankie barely paid attention. He already knew.

  “Ever hear of Jimmy Prince’s Home of the Stars?” Luegner asked.

  “No,” I said. “Where is it? Camden?”

  “Very funny. No, it’s in Passaic. It’s famous. All the top jazzmen played there, all the big singers. Mr. Principe’s trying to open things up a bit, stay up with the times. He asked me to find him a rock-and-roll band that could really wow the crowd, musicians who can really play. And here’s the kicker, fellas. We’re talking five nights, two thousand, two hundred and fifty bucks. You hear what I just said? Where else could you boys cash in like that? You couldn’t earn that kind of money playing shore clubs in August seven nights a week.”

  Stosh pulled out his business notebook. With the dates of our gigs.

  “When is it?” he asked.

  “First full week in March.”

  “We’re back at Lancelot’s Lair that week,” I said.

  Luegner waved away my concern. “I’ll handle that for you. I’ve known Gus for years. He’ll let you swap dates.”

  Stosh looked at me. “It’s good money.”

  “Shouldn’t we wait until the Fillmore gig? See what comes out of it?”

  “A bird in the hand’s worth two in the bush. That’s what Benjamin Franklin said,” Luegner told me.

  “What band’s he with?”

  “Very funny. Come on now, Will. You may be a college boy, but I’ll bet all of your friends here could use that money, even if you don’t need it. I know people on Wall Street who don’t make that kind of dough.” He plopped down on the engineer’s stool, as if my arguments had exhausted him. “All I’m asking is a fair shake. I believe in you boys, I really do. In every last one of you. And I think you should consider all of your options. Look things over carefully. Then make your decision. Look before you leap, you know what they say. Let me run your demo past my friend at Capitol, and I guarantee the tape will be back in your hands in plenty of time to keep Milt Ehrlich happy. In fact, if Frankie here wants to come down on the train and pick it up on his way to Manhattan, I’ll personally put it in his hands. Guaranteed.”

  “Let us make some copies.”

  “There’ll be time for that, Will. Just hold your horses. Let me show you what I can do. If you’re not happy with what I deliver, we all part friends, and no hard feelings.” He smiled, but there were spiders in his eyes. “At least, I hope there’d be no hard feelings.”

  In his world, he was faster than me, smarter, better. I always knew what I should have said, but only after he was gone.

  Luegner looked at his watch. It had diamonds on the face. My father believed that only pimps and prizefighters wore watches studded with diamonds.

  He sighed wearily. “Well, I’ve got another band to audition across town. Everybody wa
nts Danny Luegner to be their sugar daddy. One of these days, I’m going to have to close my list. So … what do you want me to tell Mr. Principe? You boys want that gig?”

  The others murmured their assent, nodding and shuffling about. I said nothing.

  As he pulled on his overcoat, Luegner said, “One last thing. Just a formality. This one time, I’m going to book you as Frankie Star and the Innocents. A club like Jimmy Principe’s needs a headline name for the marquee.”

  * * *

  I drove home with Matty, who didn’t want to talk. I fantasized about all the things I should have or could have said to Danny Luegner, including asking him if he knew his beloved Frankie Star, the next Tom Jones, was dealing heavy dope.

  The rumors kept getting worse. Frankie wasn’t just spreading a little weed around or shaving off dimes of hash, he was wholesaling on the better-living-through-chemistry side. The heads’ grapevine back home claimed that he was fronting for the Warlocks.

  I still didn’t understand why Frankie would do it. But I didn’t understand much else, either.

  One of my wishes was about to come true.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The week before our gig at the Fillmore East, we played a dance at Cardinal Brennan High. We had agreed to the booking months before, for sentimental reasons. The money was a joke, but five people in and around the band had ties to the place, and its hallways had been the scene of Angela’s most visible teenage sins. We had played at the school before, as the Destroyerz, and it surprised me when the priests and nuns complained less about the volume and style of our music than did the faculty and chaperones at public highs. I suppose confession needed perking up.

  The heat had come on just before we arrived at the gym. Joey and Pete had lugged our gear in through the slush and we all helped set up, as much to get warm as from comradeship. Despite the grim weather, we all felt buzzed, with Angela in her friendliest mood in weeks and Laura along to show that she believed in me. Joey’s new girl cracked outrageous jokes and Pete’s Dutchie steady, Beth, had grown close to Red in one of the oddest friendships in local history. It didn’t worry Pete, so we shrugged our shoulders.

  I tried to be fair to Laura. I knew that she was fighting to claim her life, to grow strong, like a mended bone. I even grasped that her endless talk of books was a means to control the pace of daily reality. She was proud and uncertain and fragile, although her python’s grip returned at night.

  Determined to please me, she wore the scarf I had given her at Christmas. It overpowered her simple sweater and jeans. Her eyes seemed wildly smart that night, penetrating and pure. As she sat tucked between the other girls for warmth, her beauty rallied to startle me again. Not every male in the gathering crowd would have envied me—teenagers, not gentlemen, prefer blondes—but a mythic hero, blundering in, would have seized her.

  Yet I knew that I had had enough. She had worn me out. I was sick of being on guard and wanted a girl who remembered how to laugh. I longed for an easy love, and Laura was hard. I didn’t want to be anybody’s crutch. And, of course, I knew that the world’s supply of women was endless.

  As I tuned, my fingers were cold and my ears recalcitrant. As politely as I could, I brushed off the high school kids who wanted to talk and bought two hot chocolates from the just opened refreshment table. The warm paper cups were a comfort in my hands.

  I walked over to the girls, extending one of the hot chocolates before I saw that Laura already had a drink. Steam rose from a cup in her joined fingers.

  She looked up from the lowest bench on the bleachers and smiled. “Angela gave me some hot apple cider.”

  Skeletal even in her winter coat, Angela broke the tough-girl crook of her mouth to say, “It’s better for you than hot chocolate, ain’t?”

  “I didn’t see the cider.”

  “I brought a thermos,” Angela told me. “But that’s the last of it.”

  I shook my head. “You never seemed like an apple cider kind of girl to me.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. Take it easy.” I glanced at the other female faces. “Anybody want a hot chocolate?”

  “I’ll take it,” Beth said. “I wouldn’t want it should go to waste none.”

  We kicked off the set with “Born to Be Wild” and mixed in plenty of covers with our originals. It was the kind of gig where you just have a good time, and it was amusing to watch the kids segregate themselves into a superficially scruffy minority who clustered by the stage and longed to be hip, the dancing couples who were going to catch colds in backseats later on, and the eternal guys hanging out at the back of the gym. Given the wretched weather, the turnout was surprising. The Innocents had become a serious draw.

  A young priest posted himself with the kiddie-car hippies. He shook his head wildly, not quite keeping the beat.

  The cord between my guitar and my amps began shorting out. Pete just walked up onto the stage and replaced it. Nothing was going to perturb us that night, not even when Frankie did the impossible and broke a bass string. We simply ended the first set one song early so he could put on a new one.

  Followed most of the way by a kid who wanted to play me a couple of songs he’d written, I found Laura wearing a beatific expression.

  “That was … brilliant,” she told me. “I never realized…”

  I laughed. “That’s a switch. You should’ve heard us at the Electric Factory.”

  “Really profound … it’s so intense…”

  “You all right?”

  She nodded. Slowly. “I feel a little strange, actually. Sort of dizzy. Not dizzy exactly, that’s not what I mean…”

  “Are you sick?”

  “No.” The poor light sculpted her features and lent her mystery. “I just … want to hear the music. I’m okay. I just feel a little strange—”

  The priest who had been rocking out in front of the stage interrupted.

  “May I speak with you? For a minute?”

  “Sure, Padre. What’s up?” I signaled Laura that I’d be right back and strolled off with our new fan.

  “You didn’t attend Cardinal Brennan. Did you?”

  “No, Father. Pottsville High.”

  He pondered that, as if calculating my penance. “May I assume that you belong to a Protestant denomination?”

  “Episcopalian.”

  “Isn’t that wonderful? The way this music brings us all together? I believe the youth revolution can be a force for peace.”

  “Sure.”

  “I mean, isn’t it possible that it will be music that finally joins us all? I don’t mean only Christians.”

  “It’s just music,” I told him. “In the end.” It was bizarre to find myself on the other side of the argument. “The peace-and-love stuff isn’t always sincere.”

  He frowned. “Don’t you think so? Don’t you think there’s a universal impulse toward peace? And that music—music like yours—might awaken it? Look at how excited you make these young people.”

  “It’s only good while it lasts. They just go home afterwards.”

  Uninterested in what I had to say, he extended his arms, halfway to a benediction. “We have to be open to fresh ways of reaching people, to new paths to salvation, that’s the thing. We have to think in terms of all humanity.”

  I didn’t see our music leading anyone to salvation. It startled me to recognize that I had become a cynic about the thing I loved most in the world.

  “I’ve taken St. Thomas as my personal field of study and contemplation,” he confided. “The question of whether he carried Christ’s message to India. I hope to go there. I think India may have something to teach us.”

  I wasn’t convinced of that, either. The priest seemed as bright and shiny as a Christmas toy.

  “That’s cool.”

  “I just feel that music can offer us a glimpse of the divine, that it carries a message of universal love. Who’s to say that St. Theresa’s ecstasies have no relation to the experiences o
f today’s youth?”

  I heard a double twang from the makeshift stage: Matty tuning his guitar. It was time to play again.

  “Listen, Father, it’s been great talking to you. But I’ve got to go play now.”

  “Just one last question. What do you make of the Mothers of Invention? As social critics?”

  I broke free and hurried over to check on Laura. In case she really wasn’t feeling well.

  She had left her seat. Angela took my measure with narrowed eyes. Onstage, Stosh tapped his sticks over the drum kit.

  “She went to the can,” Angela told me. “With Red.”

  “She isn’t feeling well.”

  Angela lifted her shoulders and dropped them again. So what?

  “She seemed okay to me,” the bitch said.

  * * *

  In the middle of the third song of the set, I saw Laura reenter the gym. Red guided her, a mother helping a child take its first steps. I decided I’d take Laura home at the next break. The band could play the last set as a trio. The high school kids wouldn’t miss me.

  The crisis didn’t wait. During Frankie’s between-song patter, a commotion ignited over on the bleachers. A girl wailed. It was Laura.

  I stepped beyond the stage lights so I could see. Laura flailed her arms at everyone near her. As if to drive away every living thing.

  “Go on without me.” I handed my guitar to Pete, who was checking a mike connection.

  An older nun and the young priest beat me to Laura. The kids were interested, too. I shouldered them all aside.

  Laura had stopped shrieking. Her fit diminished to a pantomime of a tipsy ballerina. She looked at me in surprise, as if my appearance made no sense at all.

  I took her, gently, by the upper arms.

  “Laura, it’s all right.” Although I had no idea what “it” was.

  Her eyes explained things. The pupils were dilated hugely.

  Three steps up the bleachers, Angela grinned.

  “What did you give her?” I shouted. I didn’t give a damn who heard me. Let them call the cops.

  Laura began to cry and shiver.

  Angela’s grin declined to a knowing smile. She didn’t answer me.