Keeping Time
John Sayles’s short story, “Keeping Time,” inspired the film Honeydripper. “Keeping Time” was published in Dillinger in Hollywood, a collection of short stories by John, published by Nation Books. More on the book with information on how to purchase a copy on NationBooks.org.
The owner isn’t around, so there is only an old man to help Mike with his kit. Each time Mike hands him another case from the van he examines it, then nods and goes “Uh-huh” as if he’s taking inventory. The old man is lanky, with maple-colored skin and eyes huge and soft behind the thick lenses.
“Got to deal with the mess,” he says, when it’s all inside, and leaves Mike to set up alone.
The kit is pretty simple these days. Only two rack toms, floor tom, couple cymbals, the bass he just bought, and the snare he’s had forever. Mike looks to the back of the room where the old man is cleaning. The distance throws his time off, a gap between the push of the broom and the sweeping sound. Mike tightens the head on the snare. Need the firepower.
It is a club he hasn’t played before, though club is an exaggeration. A former grange hall with a makeshift bar, plywood sheet laid on shipping pallets for a stage. The stage is against the wall, which is better acoustics and always makes Mike feel more secure. The time outdoors in the storm with Blood Source, when he tumbled into the ooze below the bandstand, neither the players in front nor the rain-soaked headbangers in the field noticed he was gone till his solo came up.
He’s played worse.
If the janitor doesn’t stick around for the first set he’ll be the oldest person in the club. Bet on it. The last show, keeping time under the new girl’s vocal and looking out at the children in their torn clothes, washed in the red light, it sat on him hard.
The time he was keeping brought a picture to him, like it always did. This time he was breaking rocks on a chain gang, not a soulful, swinging Sam Cooke kind of scene but something nasty and tired where each heavy-armed chop was another day off his life. It sat on him hard and heavy and he looked out at the kids in the red light and thought “Am I boring them, or are they boring me?”
“Man, you were buried in that groove tonight!” Joey said at the motel later. “Thought we’d have to call nine-one-one.”
And later still, the phone call to his kid on the Coast, the long stretches of dead air between them that Mike wanted to fill with drumming, screaming, something. “If it’s too loud, you’re too old,” said the kid at the mixer board who’d kept creeping the volume up all night.
There was a time he’d be wired already, adrenaline pumping, just setting the kit up. Attack mode. Showtime. Standing on the edge, waiting for the music to give him a nudge.
Mike’s hands lay palm down on his thighs, dead meat.
The janitor comes up with a full dustpan to dump in a cardboard box next to the stage. He smiles at Mike.
“Mr. Time,” he says, eyes flicking over the pieces of the drum kit. “Mr. Rhythm.”
The old man chuckles to himself as he turns back to his work. Mike sighs and sits into the kit, rolling the sticks around his fingers to limber up. There was no time to practice before the gig last night or the night before. It seems pointless sometimes, a drummer with half his chops could sit in on most of the songs and nobody would notice, but by now it’s a habit. Mike starts with simple paradiddles, bringing the tempo up very slowly, and the old, familiar picture comes–knuckles taped, stroking the speed bag at some dingy boxer’s gym—pa-pa-pa-pa pa-pa-pa-pa pa-pa-pa-pa
Easy combinations, barely breaking a sweat. His right foot starts to work the bass drum in—boomp—like a solid shot to the body. Then he’s up on the ride cymbal-doing little featherweight dance moves.
Cheechee-chacha-cheechee-chacha-cheechee-chacha-cheechee—jumping rope cross-handed, staring to feel better in a mindless way, approaching a groove, and the few times the old man comes up looking like he’s going to throw down some story about his lumbago, Mike drives him away with power fills, punishing the crash cymbals with a knockout flurry till the janitor is back across the room. Back to the basics, then, but faster.
Faster.
Faster.
(Warp speed on the snare, the sound pulsing as the single chops roll together, cymbals giving it some outline, bridges cracking before a flood.)
When he was a kid, Mike practiced on pillows. It would bug his parents without giving them the noise to protest and built up his wrists and hands, so that when he got on real heads, they just flew. There was a kid down the street whose father bought a new car every three years and the kid had a Slingerland set in his garage that he never used because he was time-deaf. Mike worked hard keeping on the kid’s good side and maybe once a week he’d get to pull the garage door down and go at it. The drums had been in his head since he was 8 and he’d keep time with his hands on the back of the seat in the old Dodge till his father noticed and wrenched the dial from Duane Eddy to Perry Como. By the time he was thirteen, he was sneaking off to play with older kids in a band called the Squires, getting to show off on Telstar, which they used as their theme song. They only knew six or seven songs but played them at great length and great volume, and it was thrilling.
Mike is sailing somewhere over a hundred-twenty beats a minute, working the whole kit, when he realizes one the toms is flat and he has to stop.
The old man is there in a moment, the same little smile fixed on his face.
“What you call your band?”
“You never heard of it.”
“Maybe I have.” It is a sweet smile but it feels like he’s looking for an opening. Mike hits the tom, listening.
“Orpheus Descending,” he says.
The old man shakes his head. “Never heard of it.”
“We’re new.”
The old man nods. “How ’bout you? You ain’t so new. Know your way around them drums, too. ‘Spect you been with somebody else I might know.”
“The Squires,” says Mike, adjusting the head. He notices that the old man’s fingers on both hands are curled with arthritis. “The Mudhens, Blood Source, the Krypton Kowboys, Natty Weasel, Zenophobe, Cheese in the Mail, Junior Birdmen, Bonesteel, Dislexia, G-Force—”
The old man looks at him without expression.
“I spent fifteen years in something called Faith. Fella named Jay Kelly put it together,” says Mike, feeling grumpy.
“Never heard of them neither,” says the old man. “Somewheres you learned to play, though.”
Mike takes it as a compliment and lays down the intro to “Paint It Black.” Everything is in tune. Mike goes back to his chopbuilders, running off five-stroke rolls and trying to ignore the old black man staring at him with magnified eyes. Faith was the one that broke his heart. They started out doing covers, all them just kids, but Jay could write and sing a bit and they all could play and the music was just exploding in so many directions and there was always a gig someplace. Jay called it hillbilly funk but it was really a little bit of everything, which was one of the reasons the record companies nibbled but never bit.
“Eclectic,” the A and R guy would say. “You people figure out what you’re doing, let me know.”
“We’re playing music,” Jay would say. Jay was born with a chip on his shoulder and liked to insult record brass. “When you feel like recording some, let us know.”
They had an old school bus painted like a gila monster that the bass player, Elsewhere Evans, would drive from gig to gig, wearing a leather fringe vest and a Ralph Kramden hat. He was the only one of them not doing serious drugs, pulling numbers onstage that left Jay shaking his head. “The laws of gravity do not apply,” Jay would say and Elsewhere would give that big-eyed look like he just realized there were other people on the planet. They always left time for at least one state-police pullover on the way.
They built up a bit of a following, shared bills with groups that got contracts, got famous, crashed and burned. But Faith stayed where it was, playing clubs and small auditoriums, getting tighter, always talking about producing their own album when they saved enough money. They came very close.
Girlfriends came and went. People in other groups started to cover some of Jay’s stuff in their live acts. They played Germany for six months and all got the flu. They came back and nothing had changed.
“We play music,” Jay would tell them, at the end of one of their long bus-ride debates. “That’s what we do. The other stuff, recording, being on a fucking TV show, whatever, that’s something else. It’s advertising.” He made the word sound like an unnatural sex act. “You want that, there’s other bands.”
There wasn’t too much to think about, really, no reason to keep track of passing time. Mike was making a living playing the drums, traveling and sleeping late and getting high and getting it on with pretty girls and hooked deep into the music, cutting time into whatever pieces he wanted and jolting them back through the people in the room and it was thrilling with a regularity that made him understand the junkies he’d meet on the road, thrilling in a way that hawks from the record labels and the session geeks could never fathom.
But they all hung on Jay like children to a moody father—loving him and resenting him like children, giggling behind his back but following blindly. Jay booked the gigs, Jay held the money, Jay wrote the songs and in the last years, Jay drank himself sleep most nights. When Roach was facing serious time in Louisiana, Jay sold his publishing to pay for the lawyer. They had a killer demo of “Heart of the Eagle,” but then a British group covered it and went to Number Five, and that was gone for them. Jay turned yellow, his liver shot, and he started with the delusions. People were following them everywhere, mysterious people out to steal the music from him.
“We travel in a bus painted like a gila monster,” Mike pointed out. “Makes an easy target to follow.”
“They’re in my head,” said Jay, humorless. “They’re stealing it straight from my head.”
They sold the bus to a day-care center in Arkansas to pay for his funeral.
Losing Faith seemed like a relief at first, but nothing replaced it. Eleven bands in seven years since then, and each time out he had to work a little harder to find the thrill. Sometimes he’d connect with a song, start to feel it deep again and realize he’d been in a fugue for weeks, playing on automatic pilot, just getting through the night.
Mike launches an assault on the snare and cymbals, sweating now, grinding his teeth, ending with a vicious chop to the crash. He lays the sticks across his lap, the sound still ringing out onto the corners of the room.
A pair of bartenders are puttering behind the counter now. Neither looks old enough to drink. The janitor stands watching Mike for a long moment, silent, seeming to sense his mood and waiting till it settles.
“I used to be Guitar Slim,” he says finally. “One of the original Guitar Slims.”
Mike lets the statement hang. The old man pronounces guitar like sitar and holds up his bony claws. “Wouldn’t think it to look now, would you? These fingers could sing.”
“It’s nice,” says Mike, “that you been able to stay in the music business.”
The old man winks behind his thick lenses, then sits at the edge of the stage, facing away from him.
“What you call a drummer that break up with his girlfriend?” he asks.
“I don’t know.”
“Homeless.”
Chok. Mike hits a rim shot, smiles.
“I wasn’t but a boy when I started,” says the janitor. “Caught the tail end of the swing bands. They stuck me off to the side on a little stool. Horn player was the man then; Louis Armstrong, Harry James—got all the girls hangin’ on ‘em. I’m hooked in, even get a little solo now and then, but it’s a Charlie Christian kind of thing, you know. Polite. I come into my own with the jump bands—Wyonie Harris, Louis Jordan. That was fun.”
As the old man talks Mike lifts the sticks and sets them to a light little shuffle, soft on the high-hat. He sees tap dancers, two string beans marking time up on their toes, twin-looking guys with million dollar smiles that flash steady all through their number, sixty-four, count ‘em, sixty-four teeth, making it look easy.
“I’m still off to the side, see, but I get to shout in on the chorus and you’re more part of the story, right? Bouncy. They had me hooked up to a little amp but I’m still all bouncy and clean on it, nothing heavy, you bend a note and that bandleader—Kirby Wentwood was our man, flipped his hair around like Cab Calloway—he be on your case. And then, I can’t recall just when, it turned into something else. I believe I was in New Awlins.”
Mike leans on the bass and snare, rattling off press rolls, pounding the second four hard—
“That’s right,” says the old man, nodding his head in time, “New Awlins. Always something cooking down there. I hooked up with a bunch called Maurice and the Moonbeams. Maurice played boogiewoogie piano, folks was calling it rock & roll.”
Mike gets onto a backbeat, playing soft and steady the way he does under the vocals, stamping out lengths of time.
“Now the guitar is still second fiddle, so to speak, and I been holdin’ it for years. I come up in East Texas, see, and those old men play some gutbucket there, that’s what I come up hearin’. Their guitar is up front, bottle-neckin’, moanin’ and wailin’—but that’s all blues, which is considered Uncle Remus music by the youngbloods. So I’m playing my ax with T-Bone Walker in my head and lead on my fingers, sittin’ on it, holdin’ it back like a jockey that got a bet on a different horse.”
The old man lays his twisted hands on his knees as he talks. Mike plays even softer.
“Them early days, doing bars about the South, it was Maurice on his piano and the sax man that got to wail. Sax man was an older gentleman, name of Carlyle. I mean old. Man claim he heard Buddy Bolden play when he was a boy. And he was fat, Carlyle. He could blow, too, but in them days the habit was your sax man got up on the bar counter and walked while he wailed. Wasn’t no bar owner lettin’ Fat Carlyle get up and bust his wood, so what he’d do for solos was lie on his back and kick his feet up in the air and honk. Carlyle could get them goin’, too, people dancing, going crazy while he’s on his back and Maurice is standing up slamming them eighty-eights, the bass player—this is upright days—he’s tipped his bass on its side and he’s standing on it slappin’ notes and the drummer is hacking away and here’s me in the corner piddlin’ my little chord changes, trying to stay out of the way.”
Mike does a series of fills, crossing hands, hitting everything in sight. The old man waits him out.
“Uh-huh,” he says when Mike eases back into his groove, “it was rockin’. But most nights, I felt like I was listening instead of playing. Then this one gig we got…where was it?”
The old man closes his eyes, trying to remember.
“Alligator, Mississippi,” says Mike.
“That’s right,” says the old man Miz-sippi. Carlyle gets down on his back for this number we took off on and he plays his ass off, them fat old legs kicking up in the air, but when it’s done he don’t get up. He can’t get up. Man lies there on the floor for the rest of the set, even plays the change of pace solo on “Deep Purple” flat on his back. Set ends, and it takes three of us to get the man up and into a chair.
“Boys,” he says, “I think I popped my string.”
“Well, Carlyle is out, he layin’ in traction like a whale up on a beach but we got to keep giggin’. Some these old boys owned bars in them days you don’t show they come after you with heat. Next night we’re in some other place, some other town, and we come to that number and there’s no sax, right? There’s no Carlyle. And that’s when I step forward.”
Mike drops everything but the bass drum, hitting solid fours with his foot. He sees the club. The patrons and players are separated only by cigarette smoke and there’s beer on the floor and a ceiling fan blowing pest strips and people are ready to bust through, booze and frustration and Saturday-night longing bright in their eyes and this skinny, maple-colored kid steps up with wires bolted onto his guitar and a tiny box of an amp on a chair.
“I played what the sax man played,” says the old man. “Only I played it on my guitar. These was a hole, see, and I had to fill it. I’m slidin’ the notes, bendin’ em around, playing blues riffs and harmonica runs and Sunday preacher hallelujahs, and it’s all squawkin’ out that box of mine and it’s starting to distort—but in the mood, right?—and I can feel the people are with me. I can’t see ‘em, ’cause my eyes was already poor and I don’t have my glasses on and it’s smoky, but I can feel the floor bouncing and people shouting and Maurice he’s laughing over at his piano and I go till I burn that amp down. Maurice takes over then, banging keys with his forehead and elbows and I step back into the smoke with my ax and I’m drippin’ sweat and my whole body is shaking like my heart is still wired to that guitar. I’d been floatin’ in the womb for eight-nine years, and that night I was born.”
The old man turns so Mike can see his face.
“You dig what I’m saying, right?”
Mike nods. He’s broken a sweat himself now, and his palms are starting to tingle the way they’re supposed to.
“After the gig, guy come up and says ‘Young man, you play just like Guitar Slim.’”
Jay had a tape of Slim, singing “The Things I Used to Do,” and they’d listen to it in the bus at night. Highway pictures—headlights swallowing white line, lonely road opening up before them.
“I hadn’t heard of the man. Them days it was all new, there wasn’t this music television. Rock & roll was outlaw music—you had to go find it. This man works for a fella who owns clubs back in Texas and he says how Guitar Slim got him a number everybody wants to hear, got a new way of playing, and there’s only one of him, and lots of folks got money they’ll lay down to see him. There was maybe a half-dozen fellas out on the road being Slim already, and this club owner wanted me to open up a new territory.”
Mike treads water, dragging on the cymbals.
“Maurice told me, ‘Son, you got a shot at some serious coin, you jump at it.’ Maurice never had no head for business, he’s just playing along you know, ’cause it was fun and he met lots of women. That man went to women like a dog for gravy.”
“So I hit the road in East Texas as Guitar Slim. Has a couple fellas behind me, they could play some, and we did a good show for the people. Some of them Slims couldn’t play, and they wouldn’t last a night, and some wasn’t so Slim, see, and maybe they had a little bit of a following under they own name and they be found out, but if they could wail with that guitar, people would forgive ‘em. I had Slim’s number down cold, and folks say I even looked like him, though I never met the gentleman. Man took sick and died young. Once I got past the Slim part of the set, that stage was mine. I had all these ideas and feelin’s to work out and the people was with me, and the music, Lord, it just carried me in them days. Sometimes the people would get so het up, they’d lift me on their shoulders and pass me around, I be playing on my back, floatin’ across the room on a sea of hands, and sometimes they bring me out onto the street in them dusty little towns, and I’d play out there. Had to keep making the chord to my amp longer.”
“The things I used to do,” Mike sings softly, “I can’t do them things no more.”
“Guitar Slim days,” says the old man, smiling. “That was some ride.”
“They ever find you out?”
“One night in Corpus. Some fellas bring they grandfather up to me in between sets, man is six years older than dirt. He look me up close with his old yellow eyes, poke his bony finger into my chest and says, “You is a lie, boy. I known Slim since he’s drinkin’ mama’s milk and you ain’t him.”
“I had me some attitude ’cause of how well the music was going, so I just look at him steady and say, ‘That’s Delta Guitar Slim you talkin’ about. I’m Texas Guitar Slim.’
“Old man give me one of them nasty Methuselah looks and humps and says, ‘Well, long as we got that straight, boy,’ and his grandsons ease him away. Man, I played my country ass off that night. I out-Slimmed myself. People dancin’ on they chairs, out in the street, pretty women sweatin’ all through their dresses, and I’m chasin’ the music in deep, diggin’ down into it, gettin’ hold of them blues notes and turnin’ ‘em every way but loose.”
Mike sits back against the wall and starts to play on his thighs. Something is working in his wrists now but he doesn’t want to drown the old man out. Over the years, he’s felt the music move down from his head to his hands and feet, first as if the muscles were remembering, then as if they were doing the thinking, making the music happen on their own.
“That easy money come when you’re a young one, you just pour it away like water. All of a sudden I was somebody, see. Before, the fellas in the band would have all those names for me—‘Four Eyes,’ ‘Perfessor,’ or else ‘that big-eyed boy with the guitar.’ But now I was Guitar Slim, I was the man they come to se, and I was growin’ up and runnin’ wild at the same time. Good part of a year I carried that man’s name, and I like to think I done my best for it.”
Mike asks as he plays, hands to sticks to thighs and back in a closed circuit. “How’d it end?”
The old man shrugs. “Something new come along, how it always does.”
The old man is silent for a long time, looking down at his hands. Mike goes back up on the skins, as light as he can play. There have been flashes with this new band, and sometimes he thinks it’s really going to happen. Joey can write and play lead, and occasionally his music is surprising, but he can barely shout on key. Lenny, his asshole buddy from grade school, is a butcher on the keyboards, but Joey won’t cut him loose, and the bass player is solid on his six-string, chasing Lenny off his line, and now Joey’s gone and hired this girl, Deathstar, who dresses like the women in the X-Force comics and wears five-inch nails with black polish. Her voice is on the tough side of Melissa Etheridge, heading fast for Tom Waits-ville. Every band he’s been with that hired a girl singer has self-destructed within months. Somebody starts fucking somebody or stops fucking somebody or else she starts getting noticed, and suddenly you her “boys” and the whole thing starts to suck. It happened even with the nice ones. At the moment there’s a tension between her and Joey that’s good for the music, and Mike doesn’t mind being the scoutmaster too much. They’re kids and have no sense of time.
When he met Joey, they’d just lost their drummer, a tubercular-looking kid who played with his shirt off and chased after the groove without ever catching it. His mother made him quit.
“Be nice to have an older guy sit in,” said Joey. “Keep us in line.”
Now, when one of them gets lost or is off to the races, Mike will go find them, drumming louder and rock steady, reeling them back. Now and then there’s a tempo battle, but Mike can always win, taking off and leaving them behind. You want to play fast? You don’t have the chops. Lenny will try to hang with him for a while but Joey gets it and just stops playing, letting Mike kick it out and then dial it back down.
“Don’t fuck with Mike,” says Joey to the others. “Man will burn your fingers off.”
All Deathstar ever says is that he plays too loud when she’s singing.
Mike excuses himself and goes to the pay phone. Somehow he’s gotten to be the responsible one in the band, and Joey sleeps all day and forgets to put in for a wake-up call.
The phone rings eight times before he picks up.
“Yo.”
“Right. Mike. What time is it?”
“See that thing next to your bed with the numbers on it? That’s a clock.”
Mike hears the superhero say something in the background. She doesn’t sound happy. He closes his eyes.
‘Hey, wow, we’ll be over,” says Joey. “How is it?”
“Mr. Ed used to live here.”
“Right.”
“Where’s Lenny?”
“Said he was going to the mall.”
“What mall?”
“There’s always a mall, man.” Joey is vague when he’s just awake, the way Jay used to be when he was deep into hash.
“Well, the van is over here with all the stuff. “All you have to do is show up.”
“Haven’t missed one yet.”
When Mike gets back to his kit, the old man starts in like he never left.
“Got into a jazz thing next.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Played behind Purvis Lee.”
“Don’t think I know him.”
The old man smiles. “Yeah, Purvis done his best to stay out of the light.”
Mike starts to three-quarter the beat, wandering dreamily across the bar, setting up a loose dialogue between the snare and the cymbal.
“We’re playin’ cool jazz in the Deep South, which means we splittin’ hot dogs four ways. Purvis Lee Quartet, and I got all the rope I need to hang myself. Purvis can deal with anywhere I want to go with my guitar, long as it’s laid back and—you know—cool. Didn’t like to hear the same thing twice. Caught the drummer practicing once, like you doing? Says ‘Man, you work your shit out on stage, that’s what I’m payin’ you for.’ Drummer say, ‘Payin’ me? Since when you call this chump change pay?’ You don’t want to fool with no drummer. You ever hear ’bout some musician put his hand to murder, nine times out of ten it’s the drummer did it.”
“If I wasn’t a drummer,’ says Mike, deadpan, “I’d be a serial killer.”
“How you know when the bandstand is level?” asks the old man.
“How?”
“The drummer dribbles out of both sides of his mouth.”
Chok. Boom.
The old man rubs his legs with the heels of his hands. “Played with Purvis six months, had six different drummers. Hard man to please. Didn’t like audiences neither. He had me around to play guitar whilst he put his horn down and go look ugly at the payin’ customers. If there was white folks out there, it put him in a terrible mood. ‘This is our music,’ he’d say. ‘What they hanging around for?’”
Mike smiles and doses his eyes, playing “Take Five.” The music teacher at his high school lectured them on how jazz was real music and rock was just noise. The JDs would make fart sounds, and he’d say, “See? Just noise.”
“First it was our music, then it was my music, like he owned the whole thing, Finally he got into some kind of Buddha thing start off the set with this chant he done—“Hiya, hiya, hiya, nyang, nyong, nyang—like them bald fellas in the robes on the corner? Got to be too much for me.”
“You don’t own music,” says Mike. “You just get to ride it for a while.”
The old man nods. “You ever see the pictures?”
“Pictures?”
“Like while you’re playin’?”
“Yeah,” says Mike. “All the time. Some of ‘em come back a lot, and others might just show up once.”
The old man stands up and stretches. “There was a long piece Purvis would get into—Lord, whatever else about the man, he could play. Blow his soul out through that horn. This piece was kind of classical sounding, elegant, and I kick back while he’s off on it and I always got this picture—slave days, early slave days, and we’re in some rich white folks’ house, and they got a grand piano. French-lookin’ people, use it to play minuets and what-not, so it’s probably New Awlins. Always somethin’ cookin’ in New Awlins. And there’s this boy, house servant, all dressed up in his servant vines, only he’s barefoot, right, not the way it would be, maybe, but how it always showed in my picture. Every time he passes that piano he gives it a look. His people was musical, had all kinds of pretty African instruments, but not like this white folks’ machine. All that gleaming wood, them ivory keys.
“He’s a little scared to go near, ’cause the white folks own it. He seen what they do with it. Anyhow, in my picture, one day this boy look around to see that nobody is about and he sits on the bench. Little bit of a thrill just to do that. Spreads his fingers and lays them out on the keys. Feels a buzz coming up through his fingertips He starts high and goes low, hittin’ every one of them ivories, black and white, and when he gets to the end he knows, see. Boy has all his music inside of him and he looks at that piano and thinks, ‘Lord Almighty, I could do some damage with this.’”
A kid in his early thirties wearing an expensive jacket and jeans strolls in like he owns the place. The old man is suddenly across the room, puttering with the broom in his claws The kid doesn’t seem to notice him and comes up to Mike.
“You Joey?”
“Mike. Joey’s on his way.”
The kid nods, indicates the room. “How you like it?”
“Tough to say till I hear the sound system.”
“I got tired of law,” says the kid. “Me and a buddy went in on it.”
Mike picks up his sticks and starts to mark time with rimshots. “Can always use another place to play.”
“These kids got shit for ears,” says the owner. “If you haven’t been on MTV, forget it.”
“We haven’t been on MTV.”
“You the one was with the Steve Miller Band?”
“Jay Kelly.”
“J. Geils?”
“Kelly. The band was called Faith.”
“Oh.” Disappointed. “Who else were you with?”
Mike tries to gauge the owner’s exact age.
“Natty Weasel.”
The owner grins. “Reggae. Right. No problem, mon. You opened for Third World.”
“UB 40.”
The owner winks, raps his knuckle on one of the toms. “We open in fifteen, get some college kids tonight You sure your people are gonna show?”
“Always have before.”
The kid nods, chewing his lip How about VH-1? “They put the older groups on that.”
“We haven’t recorded yet.”
“Oh. Well, the guy who recommended you saw you somewhere, said you were good.”
Mike starts in with the paradiddles again, tattooing the snare.
“You get some people in here,” he says, looking away languidly as his sticks bite into the kit, “and we’ll wipe the floor with them.”
When the owner goes into his office, the old man returns.
“I owned a club once,” he says.
Mike eases off.
“I didn’t really own it so much as it was in my name. Money man had him a prison record, couldn’t get a liquor license. The Jack of Spades, over in San Antone. Music every night, pour you an honest glass of scotch. Made us up a house band; I fronted them for twenty years. The Extrordinaires.”
“Twenty years.”
“That’s right. Till I started having problems with my fingers.”
Mike is feeling better. MTV my ass. He looks to the rear door, wishing the others were there. He wants to play. He wants to take the college kids who are beginning to trickle in and nail them to the wall, wants to see what Joey and Deathstar will be up to tonight, wants to whip that sorry keyboard player’s act into some disciplined time. He plays simple straight eights, slamming the backbeat home. If I keep playing this long enough, he thinks, people will come with guitars and some rock and roll will happen.
Sure enough, Joey and the bass player, Kevin, wander in past the old man as if he’s not there and set up their amps. They never talk much before a show, some kind of pre-game jitters keeping them inside themselves. Mike keeps pumping.
The old man is up on the stage now, watching the room.
“You got children?” he asks, raising his voice a notch.
“Got a son,” says Mike. “In high school. Wants to be a rapper.”
“I got five by my proper wife. Then there’s one I don’t know much about.”
Kevin has his bass plugged in and lays down a chugging line under Mike’s beat. The college kids chat, yell hellos to each other. Beer circulates in pitchers
“This gal I met early on when I was Guitar Slim,” says the old man. “We had us a night. Set her rockin’ from the stage and rode it all the way to her bedroom. Indian-looking gal, brown skin and straight hair.”
BWARANGGGGGGGG!
Joey hits a chord and there is a shriek of feedback. He monkeys with his amp.
“Near the end of my run, I’m back in the same town, and there she is, got a biscuit in the oven.
“‘Mr. Slim,’ she says, ‘you gon’ be a father.’
“Like I said, I had some attitude then, so I says, ‘Won’t be the first time,’ all mannish-like and hard, even though it’s not true. I wasn’t ready for no gal to put salt on my tail, father or no.
“‘You got a wife?’ she says.
“‘Two of ‘em.’
‘Well, you stay famous, I’m gone bring him to see you.’”
Joey makes a little run on top of them, sustaining the high note and making it weep. Deathstar walks in wearing her Spandex rig, and the college boys perk up. She grunts to Mike, still sleepy-eyed under her thick mascara. A kid who looks like he’s twelve and writes his own computer programs sits in at the tiny mixing board. Joey points to himself and jerks his thumb up, then to Mike and jerks it down. The kid starts pushing faders.
“It was a boy?”
“That’s how the word come back. Never seen that gal again. Didn’t go lookin’ for her, neither. Be about your age now.”
Mike shrugs. “The way it goes sometime.”
Lenny shows up and starts booping and beeping the different settings on his keyboards, off in his own galaxy.
“Only thing trouble me now,” says the old man, “is the boy don’t know who his father really was. Probly got his some old-time rock & roll book, open it up, and there he see Guitar Slim, the dead and buried one. Only the man is a forgery, see, ’cause I’m his real blood.”
“Probably a number of kids left behind by all those Slims running around.”
“Probably is.”
“You know mythology? Like Greek mythology?”
“Venus and Mars and all them?”
“Right.” Mike has to speak up loud to be heard. Deathstar is clearing her throat over and over, something from the TB war, and the others are still tuning. “You know how the big cheese, Zeus, is always changing into things to get it on with women—a bull, a swan, a shower of gold—”
Joey does a skittering little solo, notes flashing clean and fast.
“That old boy’s father is a power chord in the key of C.”
The old man grins. “That’s right,” he says. “And when he come out the womb, he had STRATOCASTER stenciled on his back.”
“And when he cried—”
“When he cried, he cried the blues. Made the crow weep in the cornfield.”
“The music came out of your amp—”
“And went right through that gal. I was just the vessel.”
“A guilty bystander.”
“That music take form inside her, and it come out a child. With a song in his bones.” The old man shakes his head, sighs. “Still, would of been nice to see him grow up.”
The players are groping toward each other now, rallying around Mike’s backbeat, and the kids are starting to look over toward the stage as if something might happen, the guys checking Deathstar out and the girls watching Joey. Mike smiles, thinking about what’s coming. “No prisoners,” Jay used to say every night before they kicked in. It gives him a chill to remember.
No prisoners.
The old man senses it building. He brings his gnarled fingers up to his forehead in a salute as he starts to drift from the stage.
“Mr. Rhythm,” he says, almost yelling.
“Uh-huh.” Mike locks eyes with the old man, holding on, close to the edge.
“Mr. Time.”
“That’s right.”
“You do some damage with them skins, hear?”
Then Jay screams and the music carries them away.
