Ghost
Notes
(excerpt)
Journey:
Escape
The telephone rings, an abrasive tone that startles me a little. I know better
than to hope it’s Celia. I put the receiver to my ear. “Hello.”
“HOTE,” comes the voice from the other end. It’s Fife, our
road manager. He sounds worked up, like he just had to prove someone wrong.
“Yeah, Fife,” I say. “What’s up?”
“Soundcheck’s up,” he says. His voice sounds rough from too
many cigarettes, a habit he indulges only on the road. Several people on the
bus have a habit—usually a bad habit—they yield to on tour, and
Fife’s is smoking cigarettes. Forrest smokes pot. Wally and Remeny collect
porn. Mine is staying in my hotel room. I don’t go out, don’t answer
the door. “I had to butt heads with Evermore to get them going,”
Fife says.
“What did they do?” I ask. I always want to be a fly-on-the-wall
for these backstage arguments. I want to know what goes on behind the scenes
of a rock band, to know the intimate details of a rock tour, even though I’m
in a rock band and in the middle of a rock tour. When people ask me what goes
on, what happens backstage or on the tour bus or back at the hotel, I have
no idea what to tell them. I shy away from telling them the truth, that the
band members avoid each other, that we sleep a great deal and watch too much
TV, that we’re more or less going through the motions out here. Instead,
when asked, I roll my eyes and act like there’s something extremely interesting
going on that I can’t tell them. I get the impression this is the best
answer to give, that it’s the right answer, even though it’s not
the truth. I can’t figure out how to live my life the other way, where
the best answer is the truth.
“They soundchecked twenty minutes late,” Fife says. “And then
they acted like they could just slide right into our slot. I put an end to
that right there. I told Devin, ‘The contract says–’”
“Okay,” I say, regretting I asked. “What time do you need me
there?”
“A.S.A.F.P.,” he says, and I hear him take a drag from his cigarette.
Fife holds a cigarette strangely, not between his fingers but between his
finger and thumb, so it points back towards him, and when I’m around
him I have to fight the urge to take the cigarette and put it back the right
way. “They’re putting your equipment on the stage right now.”
“Okay,” I say. “I’ll be there.”
“Right now,” he says and hangs up.
I hang up the phone. Right now. He says it with such conviction,
like nothing in the world could top it. Tell you what, Fife. I’ll trade
you right now for just about anything.
Walking out of my hotel room, the sun hits me like the pop of a flash bulb.
Southern California. Celia and I vacationed close to here once, in San Diego,
a sort of belated honeymoon. We rented a bungalow on the beach and spent ten
days roaming the coast. We were both drunk with the idea of relocating here.
We scoured neighborhoods, checked out real estate. We wondered how many records
the band would have to sell for the dream to come true. Of course, that kind
of money never trickled down to me, but back then it was all still in front
of us, the dice in mid-roll, our future one giant possibility.
The sidewalk runs along Main Street, where manicured lawns and parking lots
lead to superstores. Office Plus, Dart Mart, Home Makeover. Fun Yung Moon
have played here before, a thousand-seater called the Equinox. The last time,
two years ago, the club oversold tickets; they had to remove tables to accommodate
all the people. After a two-hour set with non-stop crowd surfing and three
encores, we signed autographs. The kids’ faces glowed with sweat and
hero-worship. One offered up his cheerleader sister to any band member who
would come back to his house and party with him. “No, thanks,” I
said, struggling to sign something that looked like “Houy” on the
back of his shirt.
Prospects for tonight’s show are not so good. We tour with a band called
Evermore. Evermore’s debut record came rushing out of the gate last month,
MTV Buzz Bin, number two Heat Seekers. Glen, our manager, fought like hell
to get the two bands on the same bill. He argued that Fun Yung Moon, a platinum-selling
band with its follow-up ready to go, touring with Evermore, the next big thing,
would ensure a packed house at every stop. But neither band has held up its
end of the bargain. Evermore faded almost as quickly as they blossomed, and
our new record, Fun Yung-Ola, gets little radio play in Orange County, or
anywhere else. Turnout is expected to be less than half-capacity.
“Kids forget fast,” Glen told me. I stopped by his office when the
band played Los Angeles. Glen’s office, the whole top floor of a white-brick
building just off Sunset, feels like Command Central of the music business.
Everyone touches base with him. The manager of Smashing Pumpkins, REM’s
A&R guy, Iggy Pop, you never knew who might stumble in. “Of course,
it would’ve helped if you guys hadn’t made a country record to follow
up a rock record.”
“Don’t blame me for that one,” I said. “I don’t even
like country.”
“Ah, the music business,” Glen said with a wry smile. He sat back
in his chair, put his hands behind his curly bush of red hair. “Everyone
takes responsibility for the success, and they can’t dish it off fast
enough when there’s a failure. I wish I had a dime for every band I’ve
managed who blamed someone else for their mistakes.”
Glen’s notoriously cutthroat with his bands. He makes twenty percent
of everything Fun Yung Moon brings through the door, plus we pay his office
expenses. “You do have a dime for every band you’ve managed,”
I said.
“Hey, you’re right,” Glen said, brightening. “A dime and
then some.”
I walk up a worn path that leads to the Equinox, bracing myself. I get no
satisfaction from these gigs anymore. I remember how important they felt when
we first started, Lance’s drumming a little ahead of the beat, Gad and
Verge doing their thing on guitar, the crowd going bonkers. I thought the
music would lead us somewhere. I didn’t know to where, but I believed
nothing that felt so good could lead to anyplace too far off the mark.
Now I feel like a traitor. It kills me to think that the band has become just
another job to me. So, Hote. You’ve finally hit the big time and—What?
You don’t want it? Are you insane? Isn’t this exactly what you’ve
always dreamt of? If not this, then what? It’s starting to sound
like complete bullshit, even to me.
The Equinox parking lot, which will teem with cars and people tonight, is
vacant now, save a lone basketball hoop at the far end. The muffled sounds
of musical instruments come from inside, Gad’s and Verge’s guitars.
I don’t want to go in yet. The rest of the band will be in full soundcheck
mode, and I’ll just stand there, my bass strapped over my shoulder, listening
to the strumming, the thumping, the feedback going on all around me, not believing
that every sound could be so out-of-synch with every other sound, each voice
and thump and note in the middle of its own repetitive, boring song. I try
to make the sounds match up in my head but they’re too discordant, music
that is un-musicable.
The wood-shingled roof of the Equinox comes almost to the ground, with a cut-out
that leads to the backstage door. I have to remember, tomorrow’s a day
off. I love days off on the road the way others in the band love trips to
the strip club or nights out on the record company. They’re my days to
realign, to regroup. I can do whatever I want, or I can do nothing, just sit
in my hotel room and watch the day go by. I would’ve gone crazy without
them these past few years. Just get through the gig. Tomorrow’s all yours.
I push my way through the backstage door.
“I can’t hear it,” Gad screams from center stage.
What is it with guitar players? They play the loudest, most direct-sounding
instrument in the history of the world and yet they can never hear it. Everyone
else in the band can be plugging their ears, audiences can leave in frustration,
sound engineers can take everything else out of the mix, but the guitar player
still can’t hear it. Gad can never hear it.
Gad looks quizzically at his amplifier, his ass-length blond hair falling
into his face. His hair’s never been cut, as far as I can tell, the tightly
curled metal ’do of five years ago growing more chaotic with every passing
year. It’s now this long, frizzy mutation that’s forever getting
stuck to his cheeks or under his guitar strap. His elbows and knees suggest
the angles of a stick figure, and this, combined with his hair, makes him
look like a scarecrow, or a tall, hysterical woman.
Gad strums a few chords, holds the guitar neck with one hand, grabs the amp
with the other and wiggles it a half-inch closer to the front of the stage.
He strums his guitar again, adjusts one of the amplifier’s knobs. Strums.
“Don’t worry about it,” comes a voice, seemingly out of nowhere.
It’s Addie, our sound engineer, speaking through a microphone from behind
the soundboard. “I’ll put some rhythm guitar in your monitor. You
won’t notice the difference.”
Gad doesn’t move. He wants to solve this problem himself. He strums his
guitar again, looks at his amplifier. Strums, looks.
Forrest plays hacky-sack behind his drum kit. Solid and stocky, Forrest went
to Arizona State on a track and field scholarship, but he dropped out when
he realized he could make more money playing in local bands. He plays drums
with the same precision he does everything, attentive as a machine, minding
the beat with a focus he seems hard-wired for. It’s the same way he plays
hacky-sack now, keeping the ball in the air with kicks and stops and caroms
that suggest neither effort nor ease. I’ve always liked Forrest, but
I hated it when the band voted to throw out Lance, right before we signed
our record deal.
We figured it would be best coming from me, “most effective,” Gad
said, hearing it from his best friend since high school, his rhythm section
partner in three previous bands. Gad and Verge waited outside the practice
room while I broke the news.
Lance was stunned at first, his large frame rigid behind his drum kit, but
his surprise quickly melted into relief. He was glad, he said. He was going
to tell his parents right away, to get it behind him as soon as possible.
He told me I shouldn’t feel bad, that he would’ve eventually killed
Gad. “I don’t envy you,” he said. Lance bought a Jacuzzi with
the severance money the band paid him, and I thought that was as perfect an
ending as I could’ve hoped for.
But it didn’t go away.
Forrest sees me come in. He catches the hacky-sack and, with nothing but a
raise of his eyebrows, offers to include me in the game. No. I have to get
ready.
“Hote,” Fife calls from the back of the club. “Phone call.”
“For me?”
“Take it at the back bar.”
Behind the bar, spigots of a dozen or so bottles are covered with one long
piece of plastic wrap. No club employees are around. Fife’s briefcase
sits on a bar stool. I pick up the phone, push the blinking white button.
“Hello.”
“Josh?”
“Celia.” A relief washes over me more powerful than medicine. Her
whole person comes to me through that simple vibration, the sound of her voice.
I can see her, blond hair, cell phone, in a business suit that draws looks
as she walks by. How long has it been?
“Hi,” she says.
“Hey.”
“I’m sorry to bother you,” she says. “I didn’t have
the itinerary so I had to call the club.”
“It’s okay. You’re not bothering me.”
“Good,” she says. “Josh, I called because I have to—I
have a question to ask you.”
“Okay,” I say. “But you don’t need a reason to call me.”
“Right,” she says. There’s an audible crack in the silence.
She’s usually so easy with her words, but this Celia sounds different.
Each word starts at the bottoms of her feet and travels up through her body
to her mouth. It might be because she’s at work, people around, or it
might be something else. “What I have to ask you is–”
“Yeah?”
“While you’ve been on the road . . . have you ever slept
with someone else?”
“What?” This is strange because our phone calls, when we bother
to talk at all, usually follow a predictable pattern of “Hello”
and “How are you” and “That’s interesting” and “I
love you.” She has her life in Phoenix, and I have mine out here on the
road. Never the twain do meet. “You’re asking me if I’ve ever
slept with someone else?”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m not good at this. This
is new for me.”
My legs grow stiff, unnaturally stiff, like they’ve transformed into
stone. Something’s coming. I think briefly of hanging up and going back
to soundcheck, hoping I miss it somehow.
“What kind of a crowd are you expecting tonight?” Celia asks.
“The usual,” I say, taking the change in mood to adjust my legs.
“Celia, why did you ask me if I’ve ever slept with someone else?”
“Because–” she starts, but stops herself. “I wish I could
tell you not to be mad.”
“Mad about what?”
“Just tell me, Josh,” she says. “Have you? Tell me you have.”
The rigor mortis returns, accompanied by a gnawing sensation. She slept
around on me. “I haven’t,” I say, and I’m telling
the truth. The much more damning question, how often did I want to
sleep with someone else, doesn’t come up, and I’m glad for it. It’s
a conversation I could never imagine having with her.
I hear her crying, hesitant weeps that don’t sound right coming from
her. Every tear admits defeat.
“Cel,” I say. “Are you telling me you slept with someone else?”
Nothing but faint weeps.
I hang up the phone.
Boom. There it is. Just like that I’m back to square one, my
life dropped like a bomb and left floating with the rest of the detritus.
It was bound to happen, I guess. Everything took off too quickly not to correct
with a vengeance. Fun Yung Moon went from a Tempe, Arizona nobody band to
2.6 million records sold. Celia went from complete stranger to wife. I moved
from my mom’s place in Ahwatukee to Seattle, to Lance’s flophouse
in Tempe, to our new home in the far, far suburbs of Phoenix. My path seems
so random. It could’ve worked out a million other ways, but it didn’t.
It worked out this way. So, who or what wanted it this way? Or, now that it
isn’t working, who do I complain to?
This news has a grip, and it shakes me, the first casualty in a long-expected
war. I think briefly of sitting down on the floor, maybe crying, but I hear
Verge playing his standard soundcheck lick, a pristine version of Digs Ven’s
“Piece of Luck.” I’m next.
Fife sees me walk back into the room and hustles to reclaim his work place.
I’m convinced I look different, that it shows, that people will notice
the change in me. I can’t let that happen. There’s no one to trust
out here.
“Nice of you to show up,” Gad says, not looking up as he tunes his
guitar.
That fuckhead. I should’ve expected it from him. The worse Fun
Yung-Ola does on the charts, the more Gad takes it out on the rest of us.
“Am I late?” I say, strapping on my bass. “Addie’s still
soundchecking Verge. That tells me I’m early.”
Gad says nothing, continues tuning his guitar. He’s recently switched
from a Les Paul to a natural-wood Fender Telecaster in an effort to complete
the country package he’s trying to pull off. He’s also taken to
embroidered shirts, cowboy boots, and saying “howdy” and “y’all”
whenever possible. No one else in the band is making the effort. Forrest always
looks like he fell out of an undergrad class, workout shorts, T-shirt. Verge,
in his stage get-up of fire-red suit coat and flared pants, could be a sideman
for Elvis during the Vegas years. I wear gray slacks, a collared, aqua shirt,
skater shoes. Much to Gad’s dismay, the band looks like a mishmash of
suburban tastes and rock ‘n’ roll affectations, which is probably
all we ever were in the first place.
“Hote, let’s hear you,” Addie says.
I look down at my bass. What should I play? I usually search for some nugget
to cheer me up during soundcheck, but I don’t think I have it in me today.
I rattle off the first thing that pops into my head, Rush’s “Tom
Sawyer,” the low tones of my open E-string rumbling through the P.A.
Her work. That’s probably what happened. Some suit at the magazine,
a married editor with a BMW and specks of gray in his hair. It’s amazing
how much time she spends with her co-workers. Celia and I can go weeks without
seeing each other, and she’s with them all day, every day, eating lunch,
planning projects, celebrating victories. It’s more family-like than
family, and that kind of presence is hard to compete with, especially when
you’re gone all the time, playing bass in Fun Yung Moon and, it’s
assumed, partying like a rock star.
But that party never comes for me. I’m not saying it couldn’t—there
have been plenty of opportunities to sample whatever the backstage room has
to offer—but I never let it happen. Drugs, girls, I never pull the trigger.
I always thought Celia and I transcended that kind of thing, that our marriage
trumped it. I guess she didn’t feel the same.
Forrest gives up his hacky-sack game for a chance to jam “Tom Sawyer.”
He climbs behind his drum kit and pounds out the beat with my bass line, making
the rumble louder through the P.A. The thump of the bass drum and smack of
the snare feel like an army coming up behind me, albeit an old army, good
for a Memorial Day parade but probably not prepared for battle. Verge smiles
around a cigarette. Wally, our road tech, shakes a devil-worshipping hand
sign in the air. Even Fife makes an appearance, marching up to the lip of
the stage.
“Thanks,” Addie says, a signal for us to stop. “Now, let’s
hear the whole–”
“Wait a second,” Fife says.
Everyone shuts up, and the band members take a few migratory steps towards
Fife. We know this is where important decisions surface, tour plans unfurl,
per diems get doled out. We’ve learned to both love and fear these moments
the way cows both love and fear the approach of the farmer. We could be getting
fed or branded. Either way, the moment holds our collective fate.
“There’s been some confusion about the way the day’s going
to go from here,” Fife says, “so let’s clear that up. I need
you all to check out of your hotel rooms so I can settle. That way we can
be off to Fresno right after the show. Let’s shoot to be out of here
by–”
“Wait,” I say, wondering if I missed something. “What are you
talking about?”
Fife looks sheepish.
Gad looks nervous, too, but an upward tilt of his head suggests that he’s
in the right no matter what. He steps on his tuner, goes back to tuning his
guitar. “We have a gig tomorrow in Fresno,” he says. “The Harvest
Festival. Tammy Wynette canceled. We’re taking her place.”
Fuck. The Harvest Festival? We played it last year, a party thrown
by the City of Fresno to celebrate the end of harvest season. The people chomp
on ears of corn and carry giant purple dogs won at the ring toss. The few
kids who care about the band have to sit and watch from aluminum benches or
risk getting kicked out. Most of the audience stays back, a million miles
away. The Harvest Festival. It’s a good paycheck, no doubt, but a gig
with no soul.
“When did this happen?” I ask.
“Last night,” Gad says. “Glen brought it to my attention, and
I told him we’d do it. There are lots of country music fans in Fresno.
I announced it at the beginning of soundcheck. You, of course, weren’t
here.”
“It’s our day off,” I say. “We’ve got a week straight
up the coast after this. Tomorrow’s our last chance–”
“Tomorrow might be our last chance to get this record going,” Gad
says. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Hote, but things aren’t
exactly swimming along.”
“Isn’t this a band decision?” I say. “This is something
we used to–”
“It’s my decision,” he says, looking at me. He doesn’t
look like a scarecrow now. His eyes have a strange unevenness to them, one
bigger than the other. Johnny Rotten. “And I made it, off-off
or no off-off.”
Someone chuckles—Wally, Remeny—I can’t tell who. The joke’s
on me. Long ago, as my sole contribution to the road life of Fun Yung Moon,
I asked that every day on tour without a gig is not just a day off but a day
off-off. That means we don’t play, we don’t travel, we
don’t do interviews, nothing Fun Yung Moon from pillow to pillow. Forrest
and Verge rallied around me at the time, but interest in off-off
days has waned since then. “Since when is everything your decision?”
I say.
Gad takes a couple of steps towards me. “Since this record started going
south, and everybody else around here acts like it’s party time all the
time,” he says. “If you all want to play covers in Tempe for the
rest of your lives, go ahead. I’m turning this thing around, with or
without you. If you don’t like it, there’s the door.”
I turn and look at the backstage door, the door I just walked through on my
way into the club. It looks strangely inviting, the light of day shining through
the cracks of its border, like everything worthwhile sits just on the other
side of it.
“That door?” I say, pointing to it.
Gad tunes his guitar again, but the wrinkles in his forehead say he heard
me and is not answering.
“So, all I have to do is walk out that door, and that’s it?”
Everyone’s frozen. Gad won’t look up. Fife stares, bug-eyed.
“Well, Gad,” I say. I pull the strap over my shoulder and set my
bass down. “Today, that’s an offer I can’t refuse.” I
walk through the backstage door and out into the day, leaving nothing but
silence behind me.