The Hour of the Innocents Page 27

  “Don’t you have ears?” he demanded. The attack had come out of the blue. “If you can’t tune your guitar, I’ll tune it for you.”

  Frankie, on the other hand, came around. Matty appeared to be right that Frankie wouldn’t be content with promises, that he’d go where success beckoned. Matty’s outburst aside, we all were pumped and positive about the Fillmore appearance. Everyone knew that this was the chance of all chances. Frankie talked about the gig incessantly, as if Angela had been erased from his life and thoughts. He reworked the song list for our set obsessively. And his faith in Danny Luegner seemed to be fading. Luegner had stalled about giving back our demo—I didn’t believe for an instant that he had a contact at Capitol—and Frankie was, indeed, going to Philly himself to pick up the tape and carry it up to the Fillmore on the train.

  Neither Angela’s shenanigans nor Laura’s fate detracted from our playing. At our last rehearsal, on Tuesday night, we played as if nothing but music mattered on earth and in the heavens. Perhaps we had learned, collectively, to channel our emotions into solos, chords, harmonies, and a backbeat. Maybe a psychologist could explain it. But with everything else in our lives going all to shit, we played like bare-knuckled angels.

  I had gotten a call from a girl down at the dorm just before I left for that final practice session. She told me what Laura had done and offered to come over to my apartment, in case I needed solace or more details. Instead of being shocked at the report, I thought of what a great song it would make.

  * * *

  The Big Apple was rotten, and the East Village was a wormhole. Only Joey and I had ever been to Manhattan. Before breaking with my mother over an heirloom, an aunt had taken me to a few Broadway shows. Joey and I had gone to a concert together, and back in my druggie period, I spent a week looking for peace and love, bunking in a filthy top-floor apartment with a pal of Buzzy Ritter’s. In the crash pad down the hall, the litter of corpses came back to life as noon approached, and I learned to detect the sickly-sweet odor of teenage runaways dripping with the clap. One pretty girl with white-blond hair had become a sex leper after infecting dozens, but she was allowed to live in a corner of the crash pad, since she was gifted at panhandling uptown. Out on the street in the early-morning hours, I saw a boy cut down his neck with a switchblade. It sounded like ripping fabric. Buzzy’s friend was trying to get it together to start a commune in Arizona, but mostly he just shoplifted food and got wasted on charitable contributions of dope. Flower power and selfless communal living existed only in set-up photographs, lying songs, and hysterical magazine articles. Maybe there really had been a Summer of Love in San Francisco, but Manhattan was all Fuck You.

  Joey hired Doug Detweiler, a thug-turned-head from Auburn, to guard the van while he and Pete unloaded our equipment. But Joey was smart enough to leave his revolver at home. He really did possess a survivor’s instincts.

  Matty, Stosh, and I rode to the gig in Matty’s Buick, figuring that it wouldn’t attract many thieves. The highway was crunchy with salt and flanked with black snow. When we stopped for coffee just inside New Jersey, we took a booth that let us keep an eye on the car with our guitars and Frankie’s bass inside. We really were provincials, although I had my slight advantage—enough to have warned Frankie not to try taking the subway from Penn Station, but to spring for a cab to the gig.

  The clouds ran high enough to reveal the Manhattan skyline. It was the first time either Stosh or Matty had seen it. They tensed.

  The city was scruffy, dense, and intimidating. Even I felt on guard as we emerged from the tunnel. Philly was kid stuff. New York was the major leagues.

  “I don’t know how anybody could live here,” Matty said, as much to himself as to Stosh and me. I recalled Laura saying the same thing about Schuylkill County.

  We were hours early but ate up part of the time figuring out where to park. Walking to the Fillmore, a raggedy-ass theater that should have been condemned, we had to run a gauntlet of panhandlers. The most creative one eyed our guitar cases and said, “Hey, I got all your albums, every one, man … help out a fellow musician with some spare change?”

  Stosh asked him, “Which album’s your favorite?”

  “Aw, fuck, man. I like them all, you know?”

  When we failed to give him a handout, he called after us, “You suck, you know that? You always sucked … your records stink…”

  An apprentice earth mother with snot flowing over her lips tried to sell us an underground newspaper. When we declined, she offered to sell us some smack. We were relieved to spot Joey’s van by the marquee.

  “Downer scene,” Doug the Thug told us. With his beard and old motorcycle jacket, he looked wonderfully unpleasant. “Half a dozen fuckers tried to steal shit.”

  “Joey inside?”

  “Yeah, him and Pete. We had to wait for somebody to show up, some smart-ass Jew fuck. Hey, tell them I need to take a piss and get some coffee, okay?”

  “Frankie isn’t here yet, is he?” I asked.

  Doug shook his head.

  Backstage, it looked as if Bill Graham had economized on the cleaning budget. Old pipes dripped. The graffiti was not restricted to music theory.

  Joey and Pete were glad to see us. We were reinforcements in a war of the worlds. Except for the drive, it wasn’t a tough gig for them. The Fillmore East had its own sound system and we needed only our amplifiers and a few special mikes. But even Joey seemed to feel under siege, although we were practically alone in the building.

  “The guy said for you to do a sound check as soon as you get here. He said it’s going to get busy later.”

  The barely lit stage seemed huge, the hall vast. As we tuned, the sound boomed. Two ghostly figures moved at the back of the auditorium. A disembodied voice said, “Move the mike stand, not the monitor.”

  Matty shifted to Frankie’s bass to work out the balance.

  The voice came back. “You a trio?”

  “No,” I told my microphone. “Quartet. Two guitars, bass, and drums. Our bass player’s not here yet.”

  “Milt Ehrlich’s band, right?”

  “The Innocents.”

  “Right. Give me a level check on number four, the one to your right.”

  Matty switched back to his Stratocaster and riffed a little. We started a jam, warming up, getting some life back into our fingers. The music sounded hollow without Frankie’s bass punching against the drums.

  “Okay, I’ve got you,” the ghost voice said. “Wrap it up.”

  As we left the stage, I carried my Rickenbacker and the Les Paul, while Matty lugged his Strat and the Fender bass.

  “Where the hell’s Frankie?” I said.

  “It’s still early,” Matty reassured me.

  The warren of corridors, dressing rooms, and utility closets had begun to crawl with the children of the night. It wasn’t a glamorous set. The other musicians arrived with rough New York skin and tough New York attitudes. The clusters of girls and women who seemed to be groupies didn’t match my fantasies. To say the least. The best of them looked like Janis Joplin the morning after a nuclear blast at the brothel.

  A wan, fey dude made an unmistakable pass at Stosh, who had put on a white satin shirt, cowboy cut, with mother-of-pearl buttons and fringes down the sleeves. Stosh looked horrified. Whatever attracted him, it wasn’t standard downtown drags and fags.

  I phoned Penn Station to make sure there were no train delays from Philly.

  We still had time. Plenty, really. I hoped Danny Luegner hadn’t given Frankie a song and dance about the demo tape.

  A half hour before showtime, with the backstage scene growing fetid—and my heartbeat picking up—Milt Ehrlich popped in. Just as Joey caught a kid trying to take off with my Les Paul. The punk, who was physically on the verge of nonexistence, threatened Joey. Joey turned the kid so no one could see, then knuckle-punched him in the kidneys.

  Milt shrugged it off. He was smiling, happy. “Hey, Will! There you are. You boys ready? Got the ta
pe?”

  “Frankie’s bringing it up from Philly on the train. He’s the bass player.”

  Milt looked at his watch. “He isn’t here yet? He’s cutting it close.”

  “He’ll be here. He wouldn’t blow this.”

  Milt’s smile quit. “I hope so. I’ve got Mac Steinman coming down. Along with half the New York office. Don’t let me down, huh?”

  “We won’t let you down.”

  He considered the situation, fussing with his mustache. “Yeah. Just don’t. Okay?” He turned briefly to Matty and Stosh, who had sidled up. “Knock ’em dead, boys.”

  He didn’t wait for me to make introductions.

  I wondered if Frankie had been caught in traffic. The early-evening traffic was notorious.

  The clock refused to hold still.

  Pete went out to the van to give Doug a last break. He wanted to be back inside in time to catch our whole set.

  Ten minutes out, Matty pulled Stosh and me together. Joey joined the huddle. I was beginning to feel sick.

  “We need a plan, in case Frankie doesn’t make it. We’ll still open with ‘Angeline.’ Will, you’ll have to play bass. Stosh, you know the lyrics?”

  “Enough of them. I can fake it.”

  “I’m not a good bass player,” I reminded him. “My fingers are too small.”

  “Stick to the basic riff. Just hit on the beat. Same thing on ‘Glass Slipper.’ Just keep it simple. Can you sing that one yourself?”

  “Sure. But I’ve never done it playing bass.”

  “We’ll switch instruments after that. I’ll play bass on ‘Hideaway.’ You can take over on lead guitar. Stosh? You got the vocal?”

  “Yeah. But my harmony part won’t be there, just yours.”

  “That’s all right.” He turned to Joey. “If Frankie shows up, just get him onstage as fast as you can.”

  “He’s not going to show,” Stosh said. “The fucker’s not going to show.”

  Matty ignored him and went back to laying out the way we’d handle the set.

  The stage manager gave us an extra ten minutes. He said that nobody started on time, anyway.

  When our brief reprieve was up, there was still no Frankie.

  As we walked out onstage, I felt that hot, pre-tears sensation in my eyes. This was supposed to be a triumph, not a half-assed, patched-together job. It was supposed to be the greatest night of my life.

  Nobody knew us, but there was a smattering of applause. Sheer habit.

  The big electronic grunt as I plugged in the bass made me flinch. I stretched my fingers over the long neck, ghosting the riff that underpinned “Angeline.”

  Stosh counted us off. Matty’s guitar screamed in. And we were off.

  But we were limping. Matty played wonderfully. Maybe he was desperate, maybe he was as sick at heart as I was. Perhaps he cared far more about becoming a big success than I realized. Stosh played off Matty’s guitar instead of my bass runs. All I could do was to repeat the basic riff and hit the root notes of the chords on the chorus. The harmonies, those choirboys-with-switchblades thrilling harmonies, were missing.

  It got worse when we swapped instruments. Matty could play the bass as well as Frankie, maybe better, and our rhythm section came alive. But I couldn’t front a band at the Fillmore East level. I wasn’t bad. I just wasn’t anything much. I didn’t have the voice to carry a big song, either. I could shout a blues in a bar, but I wasn’t Frankie.

  We did two songs without any bass, extending the middle guitar jams. Matty got the audience going with a couple of his electric-apocalypse improvisations. Stosh played a knockout drum solo. But we weren’t a band.

  There were no boos. The off-night audience didn’t expect wonders. But the level of applause at the end of our set made it clear that no one was heartbroken to move on to the next act.

  Backstage, Matty got several compliments on his guitar work. No one said a word to me. Until Milt Ehrlich showed up.

  He didn’t give me any time to speak. He just said, “You fucked me. You punk. Forget you know my number. Forget you ever heard my fucking name, because I’m going to forget yours.”

  He shoved his way back through the crowd.

  * * *

  We caravanned out of the city, but Matty drove fast and we left the equipment van behind somewhere in Jersey. We didn’t say much between us. There wasn’t much to say.

  At Phillipsburg, Matty pulled up in front of a diner. There had been no vote on stopping.

  Stosh and I ordered coffee. Matty asked for a chocolate shake and two cheeseburgers. The waitress, who was young, wanted to flirt. No one was interested.

  “That worthless sonofabitch,” Stosh said at last.

  The waitress delivered the coffee. “Shake’s coming right up,” she told Matty.

  Matty raised his eyes from the table. He looked past me. Toward the front door, as if Frankie might walk in. “It’s my fault,” he said. “I should’ve understood.”

  “What’s to understand?” I asked.

  Matty ignored me. He took a cigarette from the pack Stosh had dropped on the tabletop. I was stunned to see his hands unsteady as he lit it.

  “Nam confused me,” he told the drifting smoke. “It just mixed me up. You could count on people over there. When it really mattered. Even people who hated you didn’t let you down. It made everything too easy. It spoiled me.”

  “So the Army spoiled you?” Stosh asked. “I like that. I should’ve fucking joined myself.”

  “It did, though. I can’t explain it. I guess you had to see it for yourself. You only had to worry about a limited number of things. And that was it. You knew where people stood. The people who wanted to hurt you didn’t keep it a secret. It was the only time in my life when things were easy.”

  The waitress delivered Matty’s shake. The diner wasn’t busy, just a couple of all-night truckers and one stray couple. A plate of burgers appeared on an aluminum shelf. A hand reached out from the kitchen and tapped a bell.

  “Maybe you should’ve stayed in the Army,” Stosh said. “If it was so easy.” No one was in a good mood.

  “No,” Matty said, taking the proposition seriously. “Easy’s not the point.”

  “Well, then, you should’ve become a priest. Like your old lady wanted.”

  “I thought about it.”

  Before or after Angela? I wanted to ask him. I didn’t, though. I realized that I had grown afraid of him.

  Joey, Pete, and Doug came in. Joey’s survivor’s eyes must have spotted the Buick. Or maybe it was a coincidence. There weren’t a lot of diners open that late.

  They stank of pot. I wished I had ridden with them.

  Stosh spilled coffee on his satin shirt.

  “That ain’t going to come out,” Doug said helpfully. The three of them took the booth next to ours.

  “It wasn’t that bad,” Joey said. “A couple of people told me they liked it.”

  “Just shut up,” I said. It was all right. Joey and I understood each other. Months back, Frankie had been right about that.

  Halfway through his second cheeseburger, Matty said, “I expected too much.”

  * * *

  The cold was harsh and I was anxious to get back in the car and get the heater cranking. But Matty turned toward the phone booth beneath the neon sign.

  “We need to call Frankie,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “It finishes things. You have to finish things. He’s expecting us to call.”

  “Then to hell with him.”

  “No. It’s important to finish things. He wants us to know what he did. He wants to know that we know it.”

  “We don’t owe Frankie anything.”

  “I do. We do.”

  “Matty, for cripe’s sake, you’re talking nuts,” Stosh said.

  Matty shrugged and headed for the phone booth.

  He never raised his voice, at least not to a level Stosh and I could hear. His face remained impassive, although we saw his li
ps moving and caught murmurs between passing trucks. I had expected a brief, bitter exchange, but Matty kept dropping in quarters.

  Stosh and I stood shivering, glancing at each other now and then. At the sorry end of things.

  Matty opened the phone booth’s door. Without hanging up.

  “Frankie wants to talk to you,” he told me.

  If any part of me expected an apology, that wasn’t what was coming.

  “Frankie, what the fuck?” I demanded.

  After a satisfied pause, Frankie said, “I told you not to screw Angela.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Laura began to haunt me. I didn’t expect that. Apart from a bit of posing, my initial sentiment had been good riddance.

  I put off calling Joan. Rushing to her just seemed shabby. Instead, I spent weeks tearing through a succession of women who had followed the band, or who shared a class with me, or who had just brushed against me while I was otherwise occupied. I was cruel and unfair. It excited them.

  My rooms still reeked of Laura. No matter who else stained the sheets and towels. I felt no love toward her. Or nothing I recognized as love. I felt an obligation. And I hated it.

  Whatever I missed, I could not put a name to it. But, somehow, no one matched her. Maybe there had been magic in her secrets. Those ready girls who pushed down their jeans before pulling off their tops represented a different, lesser species. Their flesh failed to hold me.

  On a trick day at the end of March of the sort whose warmth betrays you, I drove to Doylestown. Employing one of Angela’s techniques, I checked the high school yearbooks at the library. Finding a picture of Laura’s mother amid the faculty galleries was easy. A sensible man would have left it at that. But I hunted through earlier yearbooks and found Laura’s senior picture. I traced her back through time, searching amid the candid photos and shots of the French Club and Honor Society. It startled me to find her smiling so often.

  I drove to the high school where Mrs. Saunders taught, spied out the lot that held the faculty’s cars, and waited. Amid a squall of teenagers homeward bound, a few girls giggled their interest. Their boyfriends regarded me as a lurking thief.