This Is How It Really Sounds Page 11

  Bobby would always call ahead and make sure the instructors knew he was coming. There were some fans out there; a few autographs got signed, and one of the instructors told him that “Looking for the eXit” was one of his favorite songs. But mostly he was treated as no big deal, which made him a little uncomfortable amid all that sweating and kicking and shouting.

  The different schools were like different styles of music. The big tae kwon do studio had rigid files of identically dressed students in white pajamas, each kicking and shouting in unison, banging the heavy bag with jumping, spinning motions that would probably go over well in his act.

  The kung fu class did most of their motions standing in place in a deep, wide stance—straight, powerful punches and big circular, whipping motions. He liked their outfits, too: black pajamas with little frog closures. But when he tried a class, they set him in place and told him to hold a horse stance for five minutes. Legs wide, knees bent. After one minute, his thighs were shaking, and when he went to sit down, the instructor came and gave him a lot of noise in that Chinese accent. He walked out, just to show him he didn’t have to take his shit, no matter what kind of master he was.

  Bobby took him to some sort of Hsing-Yi-Bagua thing, with a fat, middle-aged instructor who wore his gray hair in a ponytail and looked about as dangerous as the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. They spent the first twenty minutes standing still with their arms out in front of them in a circle, breathing. Then they moved to a different position, and breathed some more. Then they walked around in a little circle moving their arms, like a little dance. Then they did some more breathing, just in case. Nobody looked particularly athletic: there were some stocky housewives and a couple of older guys. The master had a huge potbelly, which he said he used for Jujube gut. “Here,” he said, “punch me in the stomach as hard as you can.”

  “Isn’t this what killed Houdini?”

  He insisted, so Pete punched him as hard as he could, a big wide swing that seemed to sink into the instructor’s fat belly as if into a tub of Jell-O. The instructor never lost his smile. It was impressive, but he wanted to learn how to hit people, not how to absorb hits. And that belly? Seriously! That’s what lipo was for.

  He tried Muay Thai, but after one session with a personal trainer his shins were bruised and the muscles in his hips hurt. The Shito Ryu class was in a storage unit in Pasadena. They’d shoehorned a locker room and a tiny reception area into some raw space lit with fluorescent bulbs. The instructor was a tiny Japanese man who spoke bad English and obviously hadn’t heard of him. The style itself looked businesslike and effective, but he couldn’t see driving all the way to Pasadena to work out in a storage unit. At the boxing gym, they looked at him like they were just waiting for the chance to hit him in the face. The Brazilian jiujitsu class: no way! They’d break him in half!

  He went through a dozen schools in three weeks, until it seemed like Bobby had run out of styles. “Pete, you’re going to have to get serious about one of them. You can’t keep blowing them off.”

  “I just don’t feel it, Bobby!”

  “I got one more guy,” Bobby said. “I don’t know too much about him. I heard about him through a bodyguard friend of mine. Evidently, he’s got a lot of experience at the kind of skills you need. He used to be some kind of spy, or assassin. I’m not sure what, but it supposedly involved killing people.”

  Pete was in the tiny exercise room of his apartment, walking on his treadmill, but he stopped and let himself be carried backward to the floor. “Don’t you think that’s a little harsh?”

  “I’m just saying, this is the guy’s background. His name’s Charlie. He’s a war veteran and he helped train the Navy SEALs. I don’t know anything else about him. Just that he can teach you what you need to know and help you find this guy and get close to him.”

  An assassin. At the very least, it’d be an interesting conversation. He’d never met an assassin before. “Set up a meeting.”

  “Evidently, you don’t set up a meeting with this guy. You let him know, and then he’ll set up the meeting with you.”

  They agreed, and the musician began to wait. With the imaginary assassin on his way, he began to train harder to be ready for him. He didn’t want to look like a pussy. He hit the treadmill every day and started upping his time and speed. He started going to the gym again, eager to get to the weights and start lifting them, looking in the mirror afterward at his swollen muscles and imagining how intimidating it would be for his adversary when he finally confronted him.

  But lifting weights was so boring! In fact, every day he seemed to do a little less weight lifting and a little more magazine reading. Or steaming. Or hanging out at the juice bar and scoping out the talent. Then he’d hit the weights for a few reps and call it good. Some days he spent half his time in the lounge, reading magazines. He had to keep current on the music business, not to mention reality shows and stuff so he could make good career choices once his new song took off.

  He often thought of the man he was waiting to meet, picturing him in his forties, with dark hair and eyes and a navy-blue sport jacket, like James Bond. Or else he pictured him as a sort of human vulture, tall, pale, and bald, with aviator sunglasses that he never took off and a grave demeanor through whose lengthy silences blew the monotonous music of death. Or something like that. He’d have a low voice, be kind of slim but wiry, never smile. He’d be a good character for a song. Hit man, do not follow me, with your graveyard voice and your little bag of time. Hit man, do not follow me, I had no choice and I something, something blind.

  But the hit man didn’t seem to be following him. Two weeks passed, and he started to suspect that Bobby had been bullshitting, or that someone had been bullshitting Bobby, or maybe, and this depressed him, that a real pro just wasn’t interested in working for a washed-up front man. The Pete Harrington name still impressed people, at least the little people. For people in the business, though, Pete Harringtons were the cheapest commodity around, used-up artists who’d had their day and didn’t have enough talent or charisma or whatever it took to keep that day rolling out to new horizons. Maybe this assassin had talked to some industry people or just put two and two together.

  The whole thing was starting to feel empty. He still had no fight training and no plan for just how to do this. He didn’t even know where Peter Harrington was! New York? Kickin’ back in the Caymans with all the other tax dodgers? Bobby said he’d handle it, but maybe he was only going through the motions after all. A different future was starting to unroll, one where the other Peter Harrington kept on living large in some unknown place on his ripped-off fortune while this whole dream of justice went colorless and shapeless and dead, leaving him just another dumbass at the gym training for something that would never happen.

  So when the word came down, he wasn’t ready for it. He’d done his first set of reps, or actually half a set, then decided to take a break and have a cold soda. He eyed the room to see if there were any good-looking babes who recognized him. There was one he’d been seeing the past couple of weeks: former vixen but, shit, probably older than he was. He sat in his usual chair in the lounge and picked up a copy of Rolling Stone. Wedged into the table of contents was a white piece of paper. It said:

  YOUR MAN IS IN SHANGHAI

  He stared at the message. Was it for him? It seemed like it might be, but maybe it was for a woman whose boyfriend was traveling in China. Maybe Shanghai meant “trouble” in some sort of new gang talk. Some drug dealer’s runner was in trouble with the law or with another gang. You’re in fucking Shanghai now, motherfucker …

  He decided to be cool, to keep pretending to read the magazine while he looked around. There were a dozen other people in the lounge, the usual mix of young people wearing sweat clothes or leotards. The older woman was watching him. I have so made you, hit man! Or hit woman. Whatever it was.

  He’d noticed her watching him the past couple of weeks. She had blond hair and a thin face, an older woman’s body ke
pt in near-mint condition by some kind of fiendish exercise program. A little bit worn, but wearing it well. Maybe she was forty-five, fifty. Of course! If you’re going to be a hit man, what better way to conceal your identity than to be a woman! Take away the leotards, and definitely the kind of chick who’d put a snubby in your kidney and pull the trigger. When he caught her eye, she smiled at him.

  He got up and walked over to her, brandishing the note. “Okay. You got me!”

  She said, “I guess I did!”

  He put out his hand. “Pete Harrington. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  “I know exactly who you are. I know all about you. I love your music!”

  “Cool. I’d be a little intimidated if you didn’t like my music.” He was getting a weird vibe off her. “We should probably talk someplace with a little more privacy, don’t you think?”

  She looked at him carefully then raised her eyebrows. “We could do that.”

  He managed to find an empty massage room and lock the door behind them. He turned to her. “So … How did you find out he’s in Shanghai?”

  The woman kept her smile but tilted her face quizzically to the side. “Who’s in Shanghai?”

  “Peter Harrington. The guy I’m looking for.” He held up the piece of paper. “This guy.”

  She laughed softly. “You were always very mysterious, Pete.”

  “You didn’t leave this note?”

  “No.” She looked at it, then at him, licking her lips. “If I’d left it, it would have said something else.”

  “Oh!” Getting the vibe now. No mistaking it. “So … Do we, um, know each other?”

  “Actually, Pete, we do. I was with you for five days on the Looking for the eXit tour, between Denver and Phoenix.”

  He searched his memory for her face, tried to put a younger version of it into a vague hotel room or backstage, but he couldn’t pull up anything. Fucking eighteen years ago. “How was it?”

  “Unforgettable.” She was looking earnestly up into his face. She was completely available, and he instantly felt his cock beginning to harden.

  It had been awhile since he’d done this. Years. Now it took more wining and dining, more “relationship,” instead of girls who just wanted to chock you up as someone they’d done and brag about it to their friends. Those girls had other people to brag about now; they were sucking other dicks in other dressing rooms.

  “Well,” he said, more softly. “Here we are.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Here we are. Again.”

  He was as hard as a stallion now. He put his arms around her and kissed her. In another ten seconds he had one hand under her sports bra, kneading her breast; then she went to her knees and pulled down his pants.

  He was getting into it, forgetting where they were, forgetting about the note, when he heard voices pass by outside the door. He froze for a second, feeling vulnerable: she stopped to listen, and then the voices passed and she started in again. Now, though, they’d gotten in his head. Sure, he’d locked the door, but plenty of people had keys. What if someone was scheduled for a massage? He’d never used to care about that before. He’d been caught a half dozen times, but he’d always laughed it off and kept on going, maybe tossing out a “privacy, please” to whoever’d blundered in. Now, though, it bugged him. And what about that note? What if whoever had left it had seen him come in here, was standing outside the door right now? What if this was all some sort of weird sting operation?

  He noticed a skunk streak of gray in the middle of her dyed-blond hair. Christ, how old was she? Somebody’s mother? Grandmother? The woman seemed to sense his wandering mind and redoubled her efforts, but the more she sped up, the less he seemed to feel, and now a new and more disturbing thought occurred to him. What if he simply went soft? What would she think? What would she tell other people? Wow, Pete Harrington can’t even keep it together for a quick blow job anymore! And I heard he lost all his money, too!

  In seconds he was completely soft. He pushed her head away.

  “I’m sorry!” she whined, as if it were her fault.

  “It’s been a crazy day,” he mumbled.

  “Sure!” She suddenly looked ugly to him, her face wrinkled and eye-shadowed, her body overstuffed with breast implants. “We could do this some other time,” she said. “I mean, we could go out to a club or something. Why don’t you give me your number?”

  The sound of a key burrowing into steel, and suddenly the door swung open and one of the masseurs was there with an armload of towels.

  “What is going on in here!” the attendant said loudly.

  “Just leaving,” Pete mumbled, and he bolted past the masseur into the hallway, followed by the aging groupie. “Pete!” she called. “Pete, wait up!”

  He strode quickly toward the entrance, ignoring her. He streamed past the front desk, banged into the release bar on the plate-glass door, and stepped out into the exhausted sunshine, away from the horny grandma and his failed workouts, from his half-finished songs and his idiotic dead career and his grand gesture of revenge, from the whole silly, stupid idea of what it meant to be Pete Harrington. He would never go back!

  Except his car keys were in his locker. House keys, wallet, credit cards, fucking cigarettes. All the shit that made up his nice modern life. He stood there in the morning sunlight, a beautiful Hollywood morning, stunned into confusion and shame. He stood there for a long time. If he went inside, they’d smirk at him. The woman would find him and chase him through the hallways hollering his name. He looked up at the sky and then back at the door, stuck there beside the passing cars.

  “Would you like me to go in and get your things for you?”

  The voice was low and foggy, and when he turned to his side, it was logical that its owner was old, extremely old, with snow-white hair and deep wrinkles radiating like ripples from his pale blue eyes. He had jowls that hung down slightly at his jaws and a small wattle of flesh below his chin. He was taller than Pete, and even if his shoulders slumped a bit from the years, there was still a certain power lingering there.

  Pete didn’t answer, and the man smiled at him, showing parchment-colored teeth. “C’mon. Why don’t you tell me your locker number and give me the key, and I’ll take care of this for you.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m Charlie. I heard you’re looking for someone to help you with your Crossroads Partners situation.”

  Pete stared at the ancient face before him and its little slit of smile. Did he know what had just happened in there?

  The man went on in a pleasant, unhurried way. “I did a little research on my own about your problem. I thought it’d be fun to spring it on you like that.”

  “You put the note there?”

  “Let’s say I had it put there. That was an easy one. You conk out halfway through your workout and go and sit in the same chair every day, or the one next to it. Today you found two magazines: Modern Maturity and Rolling Stone. That was your choice. If you’d sat someplace different, I would have put it in your locker. As far as the rest…” The old man deepened his smile and shrugged. “Do you want me to get your stuff?”

  Pete Harrington gave him the key to his locker and watched the old man make his way through the gym’s shiny glass doors, walking slowly, with a slight limp. He was wearing a checked camel-colored sport coat and baggy brown slacks, old man’s clothes that weren’t either in style or out of style. He came out with Pete’s belongings in a plastic bag with the gym’s logo on it and handed it to him. He lifted his chin toward the traffic. “There’s a place across the street I like.”

  * * *

  When Bobby’d said he was hooking him up with a war veteran, he didn’t say the Spanish-American War. The man’s eyes looked like they’d been bleached from whatever he’d been looking at the past eight decades, and he seemed more likely to put you to sleep with a bedtime story than a garrote around your neck. He’d hoped this day was done getting weirder, but that didn’t seem to be in the cards.<
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  Pete had eaten at Canter’s Deli a thousand times: the band used to go in there after gigs and drink in the lounge. It had a 50s thing going, right down to the waitresses that looked like your grandma, if your grandma was old and hard and too broke to retire. They weren’t part of a scene, like at the Rainbow. They were just hard. He waved one down from across the room and she came over to them like a bad cloud. He’d had this waitress before: she was so impersonal that by the time the meal was over, you felt pretty damn sure it was personal. Now, though, Charlie turned on the smile, spoke to the crabby waitress in some secret, old-guy cadence. To his amazement, a long-lost young woman seemed to flutter up to her skin. And for that moment, he could go back in time forty or fifty years and say, yeah, definitely, might have been babe material. He tried turning the clock back on Charlie’s face, to unwrinkle and unsag it, to put the hair back and color it black or brown, but it was pretty much impossible. He felt like saying to Charlie, Dude, you’ve still got it, but he didn’t know him too well so he tried to keep it buttoned down. “So, you’ve been watching me for the last two weeks?”

  “I like to learn a little bit about prospective clients before I agree to work for them. It helps avoid problems.”

  Pete didn’t want to be one of this man’s problems. “Was that lady one of your…? You know … the blonde?”

  He waited for the old man to answer the hanging question, but Charlie just kept looking at him. Then he said, “Let’s talk about your problem.”

  The possibility that the girl hadn’t really been after him, that she’d just been paid to give him a blow job, bothered him. “Yeah. My problem. Well, you know, there’s Crossroads.”