This Is How It Really Sounds Read online

  The house sat some two hundred yards away from him, and he could see that a light was on in one corner of the ground floor, probably the kitchen. Someone was making breakfast; he was sure of that. Supermarket coffee percolating on the stove in an aluminum pot. There’d be oatmeal. Bacon. Three fried eggs, like the “truckers’ breakfast” in the truck stop, except this was the “home” of all the promised “home cooking” at every highway restaurant he’d ever been to. Who lived there, at home? He dreamed a middle-aged couple, maybe with a few kids. The mother was the first one up, with an apron on, presiding over the salty smell of morning. Maybe they had a daughter, a beautiful eighteen-year-old daughter, the most beautiful girl in western Pennsylvania, fairy-tale beautiful. He’d knock on their door, and they’d open it and look him over. He’d say, Hi, I’m Pete Harrington and my bus broke down on the highway out there. They’d invite him in and offer him something to eat, not knowing who he was, and the beautiful daughter would come downstairs to stare at him and he’d stay around for a few days in the guest room, doing some chores around the place, helping in the fields, chopping wood, and before he knew it, it would be home, and she’d be his, and they’d be living this gorgeous green life of hot black coffee and waking up on autumn mornings in a world that was antique and crisp and uncluttered and luminous. That whole life transpired in a moment as he stood there, from lying naked with his new wife to walking with his grandchildren, just a feeling, but so strong and possible that he felt he could make it real, just by reaching out and touching it.

  He made a few steps toward the house. The field was filled with stubble, and he could feel the cold dew soaking through his velvet tennis shoes. The earth was soft and rich. The rectangle of light on the other side of the mist seemed to pulse almost imperceptibly.

  Pete! Where the hell are you going? Get your stoned ass up here!

  Bobby’s voice. He turned around and his manager was up at the top of the slope, at the edge of the gas station parking lot. Duffy and Cody were standing next to him and they probably thought he was still spaced from the mushrooms. Maybe he was. He turned and looked at the farmhouse again, the window with light in it, the dark ones where people were still sleeping. His other home. Cody: Come back up here before you get shot, man! We can’t find another lead singer! The others yelled, too. He stopped and let their voices wash over his shoulders. The farmhouse was vibrating there, across the field.

  He’d never reach it. His life had caught up with him, with its newspapers and its clothes all his size. He’d never reach it and he’d never be able to explain it and he tried writing a song about it afterward that never came out right, no matter how many words he added and subtracted. The song was about the house near Wilksbury, and the girl he never saw, but if it was the story of that girl, how could it not be the story of that gas station and the barn and the night before and the mushrooms they’d eaten? The rain in that place that had just turned to mist, but not the rain of the other place that they had left behind, the light in the window, the little cloud of darkness beneath the tree, the horse snorting, the grass breaking, the old man dreaming of a life he’d never lived, the trucker passing northbound on the turnpike strung with towns reaching for his thermos, thinking Six hundred miles. Six hundred miles. Six hundred miles … The best ones always got away.

  2

  Thanks for Your Support

  The problem, he thought, was that you only had one life, when really you needed three or four. You should be able to say, okay, boss: done being me! Ready to be, say, the president, or maybe this guy in the liquor ad sailing out into space on a couple strips of fiberglass. That looked insane! Hanging with the snow bunny by the roaring fire, sipping a … what was it … Hennessy cognac? A gig he could handle!

  He sensed the waitress beside him with the tray and he draped the copy of Vanity Fair over his laptop. He hadn’t gotten any songs written, but he’d probably work better after breakfast, with better blood sugar. It was only eleven, and he had plenty of time.

  “Here you go, Pete. One ‘Healthy Choices Breakfast.’ One double vodka and mango juice.” She said it without irony: she’d been on the scene that long. Pete Harrington looked up at her over his red-tinted reading glasses and smiled. “Thank you, gorgeous.” He remembered her bartending at the Whisky twenty years ago, when she was young and hot, and, though he couldn’t place it exactly, it seemed like he’d fucked her in a closet during one of his gigs there, unless that was some other blond chick. He always wondered about it when he saw her in here, but he hadn’t figured out a good way to ask. She’s still not bad: a tad heavier at the waist, but a nice rack to make up for it. Face a little harder, but he’d come to like that in a woman. Live this life, and your face damn well better be a little harder, or you haven’t learned a thing.

  Reading the fan mail that came in through his Web site. On a good day he’d get twenty letters, anything from fortysomething women sending naked pictures of themselves to hard-core fans asking about the drum kit used on the East Coast leg of the Wreckage tour, after Cory fucking offed himself by drinking a bottle of 151 in one gulp. Sometimes he got letters from China; he could always tell by the bad English and the little chicken tracks along the bottom of the page. Bobby said they still remembered him from that whole crazy tour in 1992, but it was all pirated, so who cared? Some letters asked prying personal questions. How many women have you slept with, Pete? When was your first sexual experience? Yeah, like I’d tell you. A lot of them were still cheering him on about the thing that happened with the bassist from Uncle Sam’s Erection. He had an antenna for the losers, the ones who were way too into him. Others looked like pretty well-balanced people who just liked his music. “When’s your next release coming out?” Or, better, “I saw you in Detroit on your last tour, and, man, you’ve still got it!” He usually didn’t answer them himself: Bobby said it lessened his mystique, but once in a while, when someone sent something that really made him feel good, like someone who said they really liked one of his later albums, or maybe if the woman in the picture looked young and pretty, he’d send a short little reply, like, “Thanks for your support. Keep rockin! Pete.”

  He looked down at the oatmeal and the packet of green tea beside the mug, then took a long sip of the cocktail. Fifteen minutes to eat breakfast, then he’d get to work. The tour was in three or four months, so he had to write the songs, get a band together, and nail them down, not to mention rehearsing his classics, which is what everybody came to hear, anyway. Bobby’d been pretty clear about that fact, over and over. They want to hear the hits, Pete. You captured that moment for them, and only you can bring it back.

  He mixed some diced dried fruit into his oatmeal, then dumped some brown sugar and cream over it. Healthy fucking choices. He gulped down the rest of the cocktail.

  The tour. So far it was Old Nevada Silver Days, in Elko, followed, probably, by a week at a Harrah’s. The Harrah’s in Reno, not Vegas, but Bobby claimed it was a foot in the door to Vegas. After that the Fresno Harvest Festival, and then the convention center in Anchorage, Alaska, which Bobby claimed was becoming the next Pacific Northwest underground scene. “It’s like Seattle just before Nirvana broke,” Bobby said. “Believe me: you want these people to hear your new songs.” He’d played Anchorage before: he wasn’t seeing Nirvana there.

  He turned the page past the skier. It was a perfume ad, which meant that it was more or less a lingerie ad and an evening-dress ad. The black-haired woman, probably Chinese, in soft-focus gazing out at him from the seat of a limousine, a white sleeve with a cuff link resting on her bare thigh, where her cocktail dress had gotten mysteriously hitched up. What was the message here? Buy this perfume and you will be sexy. Sexy and elegant. So sexy and elegant and in-control that millionaires will feel you up in their expensive cars. And what could be better than that? He’d screwed this model, hadn’t he? During the Looking for the eXit tour? The DreamKrushers had just hit the cover of Rolling Stone and she’d spotted him at a party in New York. Stalk
ed him like a game animal. They ended up in his room, and in the half-light after she’d done everything he asked, she’d looked up at him, in that same soft focus, with the same look.

  Crap, that was twenty years ago. That woman was probably this model’s mother. And now he was just another sucker, like millions of others who saw the ad, plugging himself into someone else’s story. He might as well be out there in America somewhere—sitting in a strip mall beauty salon in Fargo or walking into some hardware store in Alaska wearing oily coveralls—see this picture on the counter, and think, “This is the woman I should have had, not fucking Maybelle!” And there’d be some proprietor type behind the counter named Luke or Jimmy or Arnie, saying, like, We’ve got a special on reversible screwdrivers, Harry! And Harry’d just be, like, I wonder if I can shoot myself six times in the head?

  He could feel the glimmer of a song. A sort of Mellencamp anthem about small-town America, their faded dreams, the unpretentious value of their simple lives that they can’t recognize because they’re longing for something in a magazine. He picked up the pen and paper he always kept with him and jotted, Staring at a model in the hardware store, she’s looking right at him, she’s asking for more … You were supposed to be mine, not this faded time … Something, something, something, Vanity Fair. Because it was, like, people’s vanity that stood between them and happiness, and the media stoked that vanity and kept it just out of reach at the same time.

  Maybe there was something there. Already he could see himself finishing the song, cutting a quick demo. Some quiet acoustic guitar riffs and just a bass drum to give some shape to the silence in the background … His own voice repeating, “Vanity Fair.” Then the fucking label guy saying, “Too Mellencamp.”

  Fuck them. He tried to add on to Vanity Fair in his head. What came next, after the magazine? Some lost love? Lost opportunity? Used to go to the races, with the roar and the lights, something, something, feeling all right … You were supposed to be mine, not this broken time, something, something, something, Vanity Fair.

  It was stupid. Feelin’ all right was the most overused phrase in rock, and besides, Joe Cocker had squeezed everything out of the words that was worth squeezing. Go to the races, yeah, that was original! We’re off to the races. A day at the races, it’s a horse race, a rat race—never heard any of those before! The whole thing: some guy longing for a different life, shinier than his own: how many songs had been written about that? What the hell did he have to add to that wide, sorry genre?

  He leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table and his forehead on his fingertips, staring down at the unfocused furrows of black-and-white print over his laptop. When the label guys got in your head, you were fucked. Period. It’s what they did: they killed shit with their labels, hung a word on it that dragged it down like an anchor.

  He hadn’t finished a song in two years, just a bunch of fragments that he always told people were waiting for some overdubbing, like a new album was going to be popping out next Thursday, or maybe the Thursday after that. He didn’t even call up Duffy to work on things anymore. Duffy’d gotten a regular gig with Face the Cobra, and though he’d never actually say no, he always had a scheduling problem, and even when he did come over they ended up mostly drinking and talking about old days, or he’d bring his wife and she’d bring a friend and they’d just hang out by the pool and drink gin and tonics and whatever. Because what they both knew was that even if Pete Harrington wrote a good song, it didn’t matter anymore. A song was just a shell. You needed the backing that would put it in heavy rotation all over America and send it ringing through the buzzing electric field that hung above the earth, and from there into people’s ears and into their brains, where they made it something private and glowing of their own. That energy took promoters and publicists and aggressive management. It took money, and nobody was going to put that money into a forty-five-year-old lead singer without a band whose main gig now was doing covers of his twenty-five-year-old self.

  He drank the last of the mango and vodka cocktail and pushed away his Healthy Choices oatmeal, wished he’d ordered bacon instead. He flipped the page of the magazine. More noise about the financial crisis: some billionaire who bet against Mom and Pop and won big when the show collapsed. Read about that shit in the papers, the Wall Street guys walking away with millions while all these other people lost their houses and their retirements. At least he’d ducked that one. That’s what he hired money guys for.

  Which was why the whole thing with the Boxster didn’t make sense. It was probably his fault for not putting it in valet parking, but there was a space almost right in front of the Rainbow, so, like, why not? When he paid the tab and got to the street, there was a large light-brown man getting into his car.

  “Hey!” Pete ran up and grabbed the edge of the door to keep the guy from closing it, and for a second he regretted it as the big man slowly got out of the driver’s seat and stood up in front of him. His chest and belly formed a bulging slab of black polo shirt underneath his gray sport coat, and the overall impression was of immovable bulk, detailed out by an oversize face with a razor-thin beard running along the jawline. “Pete Harrington,” he said.

  Pete felt that little positive charge that he always got when he was recognized. “That’s right. What are you doing with my car, bro?” He tried not to let it sound whiney, but it was hard, because the man was so damn big. Big men and sexy women messed with your perspective whether you liked it or not.

  The guy pulled some papers out of his coat and spouted a bunch of noise at him about no payments for sixty days and the leasing company and repossession.

  Harrington looked at the form. It had his name and address on it, even his social security number. Then a bunch of legal stuff. “That’s bullshit! It’s paid on the fucking”—he wasn’t really sure when it was paid, because Lev always paid it for him, but he took a swing at it anyway—“the fucking seventeenth of every month!”

  “You gotta settle that with them. Here…” He handed the musician the leasing company’s business card. “Call this number.” The man seemed to sense that Pete wasn’t going to push it, and he squeezed himself back into the tiny front seat. He started the engine and looked up at him. “I love your music, Pete! You’re on my favorites list.”

  “Awesome! Which cuts?”

  The man put the car in gear and it started to roll forward. “Everything up to when you went solo. It was all downhill after that.”

  The tires chirped and Pete Harrington watched the yellow Boxster disappear over the hill toward Doheny. Thanks, man, he thought. Thanks for your support.

  * * *

  They met up for lunch at a restaurant he’d read about in Los Angeles magazine, the latest French-sounding place on Avenue of the Stars where a lot of the Creative Artists agents took their clients for lunch. Table for four for Mr. Harrington. The valet showed the proper professional respect, Hello, Mr. Harrington, even though Pete thought he saw a glimmer of surprise at the Volkswagen he drove up in. It was the extra car he kept around for out-of-town visitors. “Mine’s in the shop,” he explained, and he gave the valet a twenty-dollar tip, just to show him he could. The hostess was a nice-looking brunette, probably thirty-five, professional hostess-actress type you found in the high-end restaurants. She recognized him and told him she liked his music and she looked like she just might be doable if he took her out to dinner and a club. He ordered a vodka and mango cocktail as she led him to his table. “Bring it quick!” He smiled as they came into view of the three men. “It looks like I’m going to need it.”

  Bobby was sitting next to his investment guy, Jason, and across from them was Lev, his accountant. He could sense a weird energy: the three men weren’t chewing over the menu or bullshitting about little stuff. They were huddled together talking something over, and Bobby was saying something low and sharp-sounding to Jason as he and the hostess reached them. There was an orchid on the table and sweating glasses of sparkling water with lemon wedges next t
o the plates.

  “Hey Pete!” Jason came halfway to his feet and stuck out his hand like he was grabbing on to a life preserver. He had a sickly look of welcome on his face that hung like a stink in the space between them. He was about ten years older than Pete, a small man with thinning hair that was badly dyed to an army-boot black. It never worked on those older guys, like, Hey, your face is all wrinkly and you’ve got the hair of a twenty-year-old? I don’t think so. Jason wore a suit and tie, as always, because the financial guys always wanted to show how permanent and conservative they were, and how carefully they were watching your money. He didn’t put out a lot of confidence at the moment: he was cringing in his corner of the booth, avoiding contact with Bobby’s heavy body as if Bobby was an electric fence. It looked like he’d been brought here at gunpoint.

  Bobby and Lev both stood up and gave him a serious greeting. Lev, his accountant, was wearing a short-sleeve silk shirt with royal flushes on it that he’d picked up in Bangkok. He had about a dozen from the same store. He’d told Pete all about it one time, but Pete had forgotten what it was that made them special. Same as the hipster goatee reduced to a half-inch patch of beard on his chin, a style that had been around for a while but that he must have figured was still current. Bobby was as usual: a big curly head of black hair, a dark T-shirt over his gut. Over six feet tall. He’d been a road manager before he took on all the management duties and he still had that roadie vibe. The guy who could heft an amp into a semi at two in the morning and still stiff-arm some late-night autograph seeker when necessary.

  Except for the weird vibe, this wasn’t so different from how things were supposed to work. Usually, when some little money glitch came up he’d get a call from Lev giving him a little lecture about not pissing away his money quite so fast on shit like coke and racehorses, and then he’d have Lev call Jason and they’d talk to each other and the noise would go away. So what were they all doing here?