This Is How It Really Sounds Read online

  He was in their world now, and every object in it suggested something deep and forgotten. He climbed the wooden steps, painted and overpainted in a flaky gray, resounding with each footfall. A child’s tricycle sat curled up in the corner, and a two-wheeled girl’s bike, colored red. The wide screen door had a small hole that had been mended with another piece of screen. Behind it the wooden door was closed. Narrow glass windows flanked the front door on both sides and he couldn’t resist looking in.

  A dark wooden stairway rose up in front of the door, with coats hung over the balustrade. Off to the side was a living room with wallpaper like an old-fashioned calico dress, an outdated style, perhaps from the thirties. The coats were made of cloth: one was the kind of tough gray-green wool used by hunters. Another was cotton duck lined with red and black plaid flannel. He saw a pair of men’s work boots on the floor by the window, and next to it a nearly identical pair, but half their size. Two baseball mitts sat on the stairs: one an adult’s, one for a child.

  He pushed on the round black button and heard a buzzing ring coming through the glass. Nothing happened, so he pressed it again. He called out timidly, “Hello?”

  He was puzzled. The lights were on, and he thought he could feel the footsteps of someone inside vibrating through the drumlike wood beneath his feet, but no one came. He moved to the side and looked in the window at the living room. The furniture looked slightly old and not stylish, things that had been gathered together over time. A couple of upholstered wooden chairs with claw feet, a field of nondescript tweed stretched over a square-shouldered couch. The potbellied stove in the corner of the room looked like an antique, as old as the house. A little square of embroidery was framed on the wall. Several old family portraits in black and white. Nothing from beyond the year 1970 intruded: no computer or television. The light came from a floor lamp near the back of the room, while from the ceiling hung an old light fixture of frosted glass. The small room had a feeling of intense hominess, of lives that were tightly bound together, and he imagined the husband in the wool jacket sitting by the woodstove with a cup of coffee in the morning. In the evening he would read the newspaper while his child or his teenager sat jackknifed on the couch with a piece of notebook paper and the Principles of Trigonometry textbook that was sitting on the end table.

  He stepped back from the window and rang the doorbell again. Who would go out and leave the lights burning? He moved around the house toward the back door, the big furrowed field on his left, and a dark-red barn on the other side of it. He climbed a set of concrete steps, and then he was standing at the kitchen window. There was a note on the glass that said,

  Honey, look in the front closet. Not to be worn at school! You are such a beautiful young woman! I hope rehearsal went well.

  PS: Please turn off heat under Dutch Oven. See you at 6. Love, Mom.

  He knocked on the door and called out again. “Hello?”

  A denim jacket hung over the chair at the kitchen table, draped by a pink gauze scarf. The table was set for four, complete with water glasses and folded paper napkins. In the center of it was a blue ceramic mixing bowl. The wallpaper had some sort of American Revolution theme, with muskets and tricorn hats. There was a black cast-iron pot steaming on the avocado-colored stove and a coffeemaker half-full with coffee. A few children’s drawings in crayon hung in frames, slightly faded. He called out. He knocked on the glass.

  Who were these people? The beautiful young woman, the manly father, the wife who so obviously wove them all together in that house. They were as remote from his world as if they lived in Inner Mongolia. He twisted the knob, and to his surprise it turned with a soft click. He pushed the door open two inches. He called into the inner atmosphere of the house. “Hello? Hello?” The air was savory and rich with the aroma of the evening’s dinner cooking on the stove. He could smell meat, and carrots and the peppercorns bouncing in the simmering broth. He could sense the white starchy scent of the potatoes, the honey-flavored coffee cake. There was cold milk, and warmed-over black coffee, and bubble gum. He smelled the tang of the dishwashing soap and the moist leather bacterial odor of a boot. He smelled the manure in the barn, diesel, freshly sawn wood, chimney smoke, the dying leaves, the snuffling of the horse, the cold of the quilts, the sparks of the harvest bonfire going high into the stars. He smelled all of it.

  He opened the door wider and called out once more into the house, then slowly took his first step inside. The concentrated aroma of the dinner overpowered him, and he was transported into a future when the plates on the table would be full, when all would be seated discussing the day’s events, then go and sit by the stove and eat dessert from little plates that they held on their laps. What would it be like to be that father? That strong man in the wool jacket? What would the wife be like? Maybe she’d be handsome and strong, climbing into bed at night with a flannel nightgown and then hiking it up under the dark, cool covers, in that alien world.

  Strangely, more than anything, he wanted to live this mysterious life, to lie in the dark with the wife, to clean the barn, to chop wood, to know the children and their faces. Because whatever happened with Simon Schloss and Crossroads, whether he signed or didn’t sign, and whether the venture fizzled or made him vastly wealthy, this was one secret he would never unravel. He didn’t understand what made it seem so beautiful.

  The pot was steaming, and a steady trickle of moisture was flowing from beneath the lid and down the side of the pot, hissing into the gas flames beneath it. He called out once more, then he took four quick steps across the kitchen to the stove and turned one black knob a quarter-inch counterclockwise, to OFF.

  He rushed to the door and closed it quietly behind him, then walked briskly back to his car. He didn’t want to run. He’d done nothing wrong. He got back on the road and started driving, straight through the intersection, which turned out to be the correct way after all.

  6

  Kickin’ It

  Pete really just wanted to get this one song right: “Kickin’ It with The Man.” One song. Not an album, not an EP: just one track, and do it fast, like the old days. With the DreamKrushers, he’d worked really fast, writing songs in a half hour and roughing them out together in one session. You catch it on the fly, he always said, because you could always tell the ones that you caught after they’d rolled to a stop. For a long time, though, he’d stop them himself, tear himself apart with all the voices, like he was playing in a third-rate bar and the crowd was heckling him about his age. Loser! Now, he just flicked a cigarette butt in their faces and said fuck you! An essential skill for any artist. He’d worked out some chords and laid some background tracks in on the Mac, but he wasn’t really much of a computer guy, and he needed someone live to bounce things off of. Duffy being his first choice, of course. Face the Cobra had just come off a tour and they weren’t rehearsing anything, but as usual Duffy didn’t sound so eager to work with him on a song. “I’d rather just hang out, Pete.” Pete got the message that, in Duffy’s mind, his career was over. Sure, he was still Pete Harrington, immortal—sure, and an old friend—but not really happening. He didn’t have a band or even a label, so why not just hang, have fun, instead of keeping up the whole façade that he still had a career? He’d picked that up.

  But this time, Duffy showed up with his guitar.

  “C’mon, Duff. I just want to get this one song down. This is a song about payback, man. About banksters who steal all your money and then skate away in their shiny business suits.”

  He’d dug up some pedals and a fuzzbox, and Duffy hooked them together. Then the guitarist slipped the strap over his head and tuned it up, looking faintly bored. It was the first time Pete had heard the thin, amplified sounds of a guitar in his place in a long time. “How does it go?” Duffy asked him.

  “Kind of like, C, A minor, C.” He splayed his fingers across the keyboard and pushed out the chords. “Then it goes…” He tapped out a few more notes, and Duffy immediately picked it up and played it a couple
of times on the guitar. “Let’s try it a little more like this”—Duffy reached down and twisted a knob on the stomp box, and when he played the notes again they were dirtier, more threatening. He went through it once, staring down at the floor as he played. “I’m thinking maybe a little more, kind of, ragged, you know?” He riffed through it again, and this time the notes ran into each other, were slightly off-key.

  “Yeah, I like that,” Pete said. “Then the bass drum comes in: bowm bowm bowm b-bowm! And the drummer starts, kind of like, sneaking up on the high-hats, kinda jazzy, but you know, driving. Here, I laid this down yesterday.” He played the percussion line he’d worked out for it, and it was a computer, and he wasn’t really a drummer, but Duffy could hear it, too, that there was something in the opening, something wicked and determined and exciting. “Let it run.” He bent over the neck of the guitar and started toying with the lead line, pushing past what Harrington had first given him, into a melody that began and ended with the compelling beat of the bass drums and the high-hats. He played it a few times and then looked up and smiled. “That’s a hook!”

  “It’s you, Duffy!”

  “No, man; you came up with that one. What’s the opening?”

  He started playing again, and Pete bobbed his head with the beat, then started singing softly. “You got some woman in Shanghai, silky, silky, silky, silky! And you run around in your big black car—” He sang the lyrics he’d written for the first time with music in the background, and for a moment he forgot all of the other things of his shabby career and just lived in the music. He was Pete Harrington again, the old Pete Harrington, the young one, and then there was no Pete Harrington between him and the song at all. Just in it. Duffy started lacing it with some riffs, skittering away from the melody but always pulling it back just enough to keep the song moving forward, to build it. “Okay,” Pete said, “then there’s a change, here. You go bowm bowm bowm…” He sang out the notes. “And then I go,

  You think you got it all and you can’t be reached,

  I got news for you, your fortress is breached.

  I’m finally gonna draw a line in sand,

  ’Cause you think the world’s your football, but now I’m kickin’ it with The Man!

  Duffy smiled when he heard it, a smile of pure joy at something being right, and he immediately continued his friend’s voice with a string of luminous notes. “Sing the chorus again!”

  In a half hour they’d worked it all out, the chorus, the bridge, miraculously, as easily as their best songs for the DreamKrushers. Duffy’s mood had changed. He was upbeat, celebratory.

  “I got another one, Duffy. It’s a little more downbeat. It’s called ‘Vanity Fair.’ Listen…” He played a few chords on the electric piano and sang the first verse and the chorus.”

  “I like it. It’s a little like Mellencamp, but you could give it more of an edge. Make it more real. Play it again…”

  They worked on the song for forty-five minutes, then ran into a dead end at the bridge. “I’m stuck, Pete. I think we need a rhythm guitar here.”

  “This is where Cody’d come in handy.”

  “Cody. Wow. I haven’t thought about him in a while.”

  “I think about him a lot.”

  “Yeah, you came down to L.A. with him. That’s right. You two grew up together.”

  “Yeah. Hey. You remember that time our bus broke down outside Wilksbury, Pennsylvania? And there was that barn, and that field, and that house?” Duffy looked foggy. “We’d played Cleveland the night before and ate some mushrooms, and then we woke up at this old gas station in the middle of nowhere at, like, five in the morning. And I started walking across that field, and you and Bobby and Cody hollered down at me…” He waited for Duffy’s face to change, but there was no spark. He sighed. “Shit gets away from you, doesn’t it? Forget it.” He changed the mood. “Hey man—good day’s work! An hour and a half, a song and a half. It should always be this easy. We could do a whole album in a weekend.”

  “Let’s crack open a beer!”

  Just then the singer’s cell phone started beeping, and Harrington flopped himself on the floor and counted out twenty push-ups. He struggled through the last three, slower and slower on each one, until he stalled halfway through the twentieth and then managed to fight his way to the top. He stood up again, red in the face, breathing hard. “I’m in training.”

  “For what?”

  He led him to the other room, where the big black cylinder of leather loomed from the ceiling.

  “What’s up with the punching bag?”

  “I told you, I’m training.”

  “Boxing?”

  “No. Ass kicking.”

  Duffy looked unsure of what to think. “You’re getting in shape. Good man.”

  Pete knew Duffy well, and right now Duffy was thinking, He wants to make a comeback, and that’s cool in some ways and it sucks in other ways, because he’s probably just too old, too past it. Who needs a forty-five-year-old front man? And Duffy was thinking, Crap, I hope he doesn’t tap me, because I’ve got a good solid gig with Face the Cobra, and I don’t want things screwed up. It was a good song, though. It was an excellent fucking song!

  Duffy pawed at the bag a couple of times.

  “Like this—” Pete stepped in and hit the bag with a satisfying smack, then another.

  “You’re really into this! Are you planning a rematch with the bassist from Uncle Sam’s Erection?”

  “No. I’m planning for a rematch with Crossroads Partners.”

  “Who are they?”

  “The ones who lost all my money. Created by a guy named Peter Harrington—yeah, I know, ironic, let’s move on. He cooked up some sort of bond fund and sold out for three hundred million. Then he bet against it, and when the crash came he walked away with another four hundred mil. Fucking betting against the people who’d just bought him out.”

  “That’s fucked up.”

  “Yeah, but since he and his buddies basically wrote the fucking laws, everything he did was legal.”

  “Been a lot of that going around.”

  “No shit. But in this case, I know exactly who did it and where he lives, and I’m training to go kick the crap out of him.”

  The guitarist raised his eyebrows. “Would that place he lives by any chance be Shanghai?” Pete smiled, and his old friend laughed. “You’re really going to go all the way to Shanghai to get this guy?”

  “I’d fucking dive down to the wreck of the Titanic and bitchslap this punk on the quarterdeck if I had to! Bankers, bond traders, hedge fund vultures: they think they’re fucking untouchable. I’m going to show that they’re not.”

  “Right on, Pete. You’re still an American hero.” The singer flinched inside at the American hero tag, but Duffy rolled on. “So, you’ve got, like, a personal trainer?”

  No use lying about it. “I’m doing it myself, right now, actually.”

  Duffy looked at him queerly, because to be doing something alone, without even an assistant, was suspect. This was L.A., and you were supposed to have your team: your assistant, your stylist, your publicist, your manager. If you didn’t have a team, it was because you weren’t worth it.

  Pete headed him off. “That’s right, man. Old-style. Alone. Fucking Taxi Driver shit. But I did get some help from this guy who used to be a CIA assassin.”

  Duffy raised his eyebrows, impressed. “That’s kind of heavy. Where’d you find him?”

  “I didn’t. You put the word out and he finds you.”

  “Sounds like a drug deal.”

  “Payback is a drug.” He put his finger in the air: “Song title! Anyway, I’m training.”

  “Are you going to, like, stalk this guy? In China? What if he’s got a bodyguard?”

  “I don’t know, Duffy. But it’s on. I will give that fucker his day of reckoning.”

  His friend nodded his head gently as he looked at him. “Cool. You’re fired up. You’re going it alone. You’re flipping crazy! But
that’s what makes great rock and roll.”

  “Just climbing the mountain, my man. Climbing the fucking mountain. You still want that beer?”

  This was where, if he’d been back at his old house, they would have kicked back by the pool and Matthew would have brought them a few beers and they would have drank until it was time to go get dinner, then drank some more. As it was, he got Duffy a beer and himself a diet soda, and they sat in his living room listening to Robert Johnson while Duff told him about the tour with Face the Cobra. He’d been sorely tempted on that one: the girls in London had been more outrageous than usual, and his wife was running out of forgiveness. The tour had gone well and the houses had been good, though by the time the tour manager finished charging them for their expenses, who knew how much money would be left? The fucking suits at the label were trying to renegotiate their contract, downward of course, complaining how the music business was dying, so bad these days that even parasites like them were having trouble making a living. Duff went on like that for a while, and Harrington would have been bothered to hear about someone else’s successful tour, even Duff’s, except that today they’d actually roughed out a new song. A great one, with real single potential, and he felt like he was in the game again, even without a band. Duff would come along, if he pushed him. They’d hit the big time together, as kids. That still counted for something. There’d be a lot of crap for Duffy getting permission from the label. But that didn’t matter. He’d written a song. A good one, and he could feel that old power running through him, the current that got a man up on stage across from twenty thousand people to shout, Hello, Akron! Hello, Seattle! Nothing to hide behind but eyeliner and a microphone, throwing out his chest and screaming to cut through the darkness and blast away everything that had ever been sensible and finite and reasonable and confined by rules and protocol that fucked you over and made you old. Hello, New York! Hello, Los Angeles! Hello, Shanghai!