“Look, the weather’s awful out here. Even if I did try to leave …”
“Just get here as fast as you can.” I glanced over at Marie. “Man, I promise you I’m not crying wolf over here.”
He didn’t say anything, and for a moment I thought the call might have gotten disconnected, severing my only tie to somebody beyond this recording studio. But then his voice returned.
“Give me the address,” he said.
20
Marie was motioning for my attention. Lunch was done. We were waiting to hear from Evan when his flight would leave. Jeffrey and Nolan refused to be in the same room together, so Jeffrey had eaten lunch in the recording room, and Nolan and I had eaten in the control room.
I opened the door to Room A and Marie handed me the trash. Then she told me what she wanted. I had a feeling this was coming eventually.
“I know the bucket isn’t ideal,” I began, “but …”
“No way,” she said. “I’m not shitting in a bucket in front of you guys, not when there’s a bathroom fifty feet away.”
I sighed. The bathrooms were out in the hallway, and the hallway led to the front door. “Wait a minute,” I said, and shut the door. Jeffrey, who’d overheard the conversation, shrugged. “It’s fine with me.”
I went into the control room to relay the problem to Nolan. “Your call,” he said. “Just don’t let Jeffrey accompany her.”
“I thought maybe you both could—”
“Forget it. I’ll do it alone. I owe her an apology anyway.”
“You know she’s scared to death of you now.”
“Then this will be a chance to show her my soft side.” He got up from the sofa, groaned slightly, and went to get her. After a couple minutes of them chatting together in Room A, he had his hand on Marie’s arm and was guiding her out of the studio and down the hallway.
When they were gone, Jeffrey followed me into the control room. “It’s probably too late to apologize to you for everything, but I am sorry, you know.”
“Duly noted,” I said.
He looked around the control room. “So other than kidnapping, what do you use this place for?”
I’d almost forgotten that it was a place for music. I answered his question by cuing up a reel of tape. It was The Fixtures, the band I’d been recording all week. “They’re just teenagers,” I said, “but they’re pretty good.”
And I liked them. We got along well. I had a certain way of dealing with young bands. I’d ask them, “Are you motherfuckers ready to play some rock and roll?” And they’d answer, “Fuck, yeah! You’d better fucking believe it!” They loved that I didn’t treat them like kids. That I was nothing like their parents or teachers.
When I started engineering the band’s five-song demo a couple weeks ago, they said they wanted a “major-label sound.” They had big plans to sell the CD at shows and mail it off to record companies. The checks that they paid me with had Dr. Edmond Castle printed on them. These were the well-adjusted, bright-eyed kids of doctors and lawyers, kids with just enough talent, motivation, and family backing to approach the mountain that they’d spend the next five or ten years of their lives probably failing to summit. Someday, cynicism would likely creep in as it did with most musicians, but that was still long into the future. I was glad they’d come to me. A lot of studios would’ve treated them like free money, putting some intern on the console who’d only ever swept the floors, and given the band a quick lesson in rock and roll being a lousy business. At least I could prolong their innocence, give them a CD worthy of Dr. Edmond Castle’s generous checkbook.
“They sound good,” Jeffrey said. “They’re good, this band.”
They were, and it felt good to be listening to music, any music. Jeffrey and I had finished the last of my cigarettes late the night before, and I had been in such a hurry at the pharmacy this morning that I’d forgotten to buy more. But my craving subsided as we were transported, for a few minutes, away from this place. Neither of us said anything when the song ended. We wanted more. We wanted the next song, and the song after that. As long as the music kept playing, time would stand still and our problems wouldn’t exist.
I leaned back in my chair. I’d slept last night, true, but it’d been a wakeful kind of sleep, and now I began to dream the moment I closed my eyes. My dream was a shapeless thing, more sound than image—bass drum becoming some universal heart beating, pumping blood into exhausted arteries. It seemed to go on a long time. Then gradually my vision returned. The shape of a man in the doorway. Not Nolan. Not Jeffrey.
“Working hard, or hardly working?”
I jerked awake, and the dream zippered itself shut.
Seton Hall sweatshirt over baggy jeans. White stubble. Yankees cap.
Joey.
I sat up in my chair, then clumsily shut off the tape. “What’re you doing here?” He knew that nobody was booked in the studio this weekend.