Crime Plus Music (11 page)

She announced she'd be taking some time off from the practice, but that was to be expected. She wanted her privacy. Did she regret that I'd done it for her? Was she angry? I couldn't guess, and I decided there was no rush in finding out. Maybe I could never have her. Maybe things were tainted now, but I'd saved her. I'd allowed the untamed me to get her out of a bad situation and stop a man who was cruel and vile. That was good enough.

At least it would have been if I hadn't seen her exchanging sly looks with a strange man at the funeral. He was tall and athletic and movie-star handsome. I made a point to talk to him after the burial. He wore a dark suit that looked a little threadbare. He was clearly the kind of guy who didn't wear suits very often. The kind of guy Carla likes, I couldn't help but think.

“Hey, I'm Mike,” I told him.

“Alexander,” he told me.

“A relative?” I asked.

“A friend,” he said, “of Carla's.”

“How do you know her?”

He shook his head shyly. “You work with her, right? I can't believe she didn't mention me. How did she explain that black eye?”

I looked at him. “You?”

He held up his hands as if to show he meant to no harm. “Total accident. I've got a karate studio. Carla is one of the best in my adult class, but that means things can get a little aggressive. I thought she was going to block, but I made contact. Felt like shit.”

He must have seen me looking horrified. He laughed and put a hand on my shoulder. “I'm sure she keeps it under wraps on the job, but trust me. Carla can be pretty violent when she wants to be.”

I didn't move when Alexander walked on. Carla was with her sister and her mother, where she was deliberately not looking in my direction.

1968 PELHAM BLUE SG JR.

BY MARK HASKELL SMITH

W
HILE
ONE
OF
US
WAS
fucking the middle-aged goth chick against a dumpster in the alley, we went and got beer. We didn't think it would be a big deal. This kind of thing happened all the time and we tried to give each other space for a quick bang whenever we could. It made being in the van easier and gave us stories to share. For some of us, the sex was the main reason we played these gigs. It wasn't for the money.

We found a bar a block away. It was one of those places that calls itself a tavern and has a list of beers written on a chalkboard behind the bar. They had mismatched sofas and coffee tables scattered around the room and shitty electro-groove music dripping out of the speakers. Maybe this is what people are into these days. It's not like anyone came to our show. We had seventy-nine paying customers and one horny soccer mom wearing vintage Hot Topic. Maybe everyone else was sitting in thrift-store living rooms listening to laptops make music.

We took a couch, put our sweaty Docs up on the coffee table and drank beers that were so fancy they weren't called beer. It was the French or German or Flemish name for something that tasted a lot like beer. But it was tasty, we all agreed on that. We also agreed that the one of us banging the chick against the dumpster was the designated driver for the night. Then we ordered another round. Someone said something about the importance of proper hydration, especially after a show in a tiny sweaty shithole, and we quickly came to the understanding that we would dedicate the night to replacing lost electrolytes.

We told jokes that maybe we'd told before but we laughed like it was the first time we'd heard them. A few of us told versions of events that didn't seem like the way we remembered them but we laughed anyway. We talked about bands we liked and how new music sucks. We agreed that drum machines have no soul and that anyone who played a Rickenbacker was a dickhead. Except Lemmy. But then we couldn't figure out why he would play a Rickenbacker. It just doesn't make sense.

We chatted with some hipster girls, hoping that they might want a quick fuck in the bathroom or out in the alley, but they just wanted to talk about how the beer on the chalkboard was brewed two blocks away by a cool young guy who always wore T-shirts from old cult bands. He had one of our T-shirts. The hipster girls made it sound like he was one of those guys who digs up dinosaur bones.

We started to feel tired.

One of us politely asked the bartender to turn off the shitty music and put on something else and another of us threw our empty glass at him when he put on the Red Hot Chili Peppers. We all agreed that the Chili Peppers were a band that should be playing Rickenbackers.

We were asked to leave. We didn't leave a tip.

Some of us were pissing in a parking lot when we began to shout. We knew something was wrong. The middle-aged goth was gone but so was our gear. The back door of the van was open and we'd been cleaned out. Guitars, drums, amps, our clothes, gone. Everything but a box of old merch we'd been trying to sell at the gig.

The drums weren't that big a deal. It was a cheap Tama kit that we found online. Neither was the Fender bass. Those things you could find on Craigslist. The other gear hurt. A new Mesa/Boogie amp and a seriously badass Ampeg bass rig. Some vintage FX pedals. It sucked that they were gone, but at least they were replaceable. The same couldn't be said for the sunburst Les Paul from the early seventies and a bright green Gretsch Country Gentleman. Those were really sweet guitars. But the real mind-fuck, the thing that caused our blood to boil, was that a super rare 1968 Pelham Blue SG Jr. was gone. The purchase of the SG had caused a divorce, so maybe it was cursed, but whatever it was, it was more valuable than all the other equipment put together and multiplied by a thousand. We're only kind of exaggerating about the value. Our signature sound came from that guitar. It defined us.

The first thing we thought was that someone had come to our show and cased our gear. The second thought we had was that we couldn't call the police because one of us was supposed to be home with an ankle monitor strapped to our leg. It had been tricky to slide it off without cutting into the fabric and alerting the authorities, but the genius move was to strap it around the neck of a Chihuahua named Manny. Manny just thought it was a cool new collar. We couldn't put the monitor on a chair because they monitor the movements and if it didn't move then they might think we were dead. Manny was perfect because he wandered around the house like a stir-crazed parole violator anyway. Sometimes he went out the doggie door to poop in the backyard. It was a good setup because one of us was definitely not supposed to be two hundred miles from home playing a rock show in a shitty little bar.

We sat on the bumper of the van and shared a joint. We were upset. We wanted justice. We wanted revenge. Mostly we wanted our shit back. Then we could take our revenge.

It was agreed that we needed a plan. It was getting late and we realized that we would also need to continue hydrating. We regretted not tipping the bartender at the tavern and spent some time discussing whether or not he might accept our apologies and maybe some of this excellent White Rhino as a peace offering. We decided to take this approach and maybe throw in a couple of T-shirts from the merch box.

While a couple of us went to get the beer, it occurred to one of us that one of us was missing. Was he kidnapped? Would we receive a ransom note? What would we write on the Missing Person report? Last seen fucking a middle-aged goth chick against a dumpster?

We sent a text message to his phone asking if he was okay. We did not get the courtesy of a reply.

A couple of us came back from the tavern with four giant bottles of beer called growlers and some plastic cups. We smoked another joint and rehydrated.

The manager of the club came out into the alley and gave us our cut of the door. He then suggested we move the van. We told him about the robbery and he gave us another two hundred bucks and said we should ask a guy named Alfonso at the twenty-four-hour donut store if he'd heard anything. Alfonso supposedly knew everything about anything that was going on in the area.

We finished our beer and relieved ourselves on the back wall of the club. It wasn't a tradition with us, not like some bands, but it is satisfying to mark your territory.

We drove a few blocks to the donut shop. On the way we talked about bands that have road crews and big rigs and fancy tour buses with bunk beds and big-screen TVs and minibars and a personal chef to make you whatever you wanted to eat whenever you wanted to eat it and WiFi and chocolate fountains and nurses that would give you B vitamins and antibiotics and painkillers. We were never that kind of band. We traveled in two vans, an equipment van with a couple of roadies, and a van for us. We did our own driving. We didn't have bunk beds but we had sleeping bags and most of the time some fans or the promoter would let us sleep in their living room, but sometimes we stayed in cheap hotels. We didn't get rich, most of us have regular jobs now, but we had fun back in the day and some of our fans still remember us. That's why we play gigs like this. The oldsters come to relive their youth, the youth come because they think it's ironic to relive a past they never had, and some people like a couple of our songs that were big in the nineties on college radio. Most us of have no regrets. We are not complaining. Except about the herpes. That could've been prevented.

The donut shop was bright. Blasting florescent light at glazed circles of fried bread must do something to the human brain because when we walked in we temporarily forgot about asking Alfonso about our gear, we just ordered a couple dozen mixed donuts. There were classic cake donuts with powdered sugar and yeasty glazed ones. But this donut shop wasn't your average donut shop, they had crazy donuts. Peanut butter with marshmallow fluff glaze. Coconut cream with mango filling. Lemon donuts with iced tea frosting. Bacon maple logs. A strawberry cruller with Sriracha sauce.

We had eaten the first dozen when one of us went up to the counter and told Alfonso our story. Alfonso was a sympathetic guy. He said he'd once made out with a girl while one of our songs was playing on the radio and he didn't think she would ever make out with him but she did and he even got to second base so he felt like he owed us. He went to make a call.

Back in the day it was easy to see when we got cocaine on our faces, but now the powdered sugar just blended in to the gray of our goatees and mustaches and soul patches. Nowadays we could do a lot of cocaine if we had any.

The hipster girls from the tavern came into the donut shop and acted like they were old friends. We let them sit with us, because why wouldn't we, and told them about the 1968 Pelham Blue SG Jr. and our missing bandmate.

Alfonso came over and said he hadn't heard anything from his sources which meant it was probably someone from outside the area. He said that was not good news for recovering our stuff. We worried about our gear. We worried about our bandmate. We drank some coffee with our donuts to keep our spirits up. We did not know what to do. We are not detectives.

One of us checked our smartphone to see if our missing bandmate had replied to our text and one of the hipster girls said we should use the Find Friends App to see where he was. This is the kind of thing we don't like about the new generation. No privacy. Auto Tune. Pro Tools. Soulless mechanization. We'd rather break a guitar string, play out of tune, and feel alive. Still we recognized it as a good idea. Especially because it worked.

We followed the coordinates on the phone but we were scared. We didn't know what we might find. Would one of us be tied up in a warehouse? Would he be dead? To calm our nerves we passed around another joint and, because the donuts made us feel dehydrated, we drank the rest of the beer.

Even though it was three in the morning the lights were still on at the house. We walked up to the front door and peeked in. Through a gap in the curtains we could see all our gear stacked up in the living room. We were trying to figure out how to approach the situation when a pizza delivery guy pulled up. We said hi to him and he nodded at us and rang the doorbell.

We were surprised when one of us opened the door. He was surprised to. He said he could explain and paid for the pizza.

The middle-aged goth chick was there. It was her house. We sat on her couch and ate the pizza while one of us told us a really long story about how he needed the money for an operation to cure the tinnitus in his ear that was making him crazy. But all we heard was that the middle-aged goth chick was his cousin. It meant he'd fucked his cousin. We would never fuck our cousin and told him so. The middle-aged goth chick didn't seem to care. She reminded us that it wasn't like they were getting married and having kids so it was none of our business and could we kindly get the fuck out of her house.

We carried the gear back to the van and, once it was loaded, one of us wanted to make sure the 1968 Pelham Blue SG Jr. was still in its case and we opened it. Then one of us swung the guitar around just like Jimi or Kurt and hit the cousin fucker who had been one of us in the head. We don't know why it happened. Maybe Alfonso's donuts have too much sugar. Maybe it was the stress of almost losing our most valuable instrument or the sting of betrayal. Maybe we just don't think cousins should have sexual relations. We didn't know if it was the guitar hitting skull or the subsequent skull hitting curb that caused the most damage. We are not Crime Scene Investigators although we have watched the show.

We put some plastic over his head so he wouldn't bleed on the gear and threw him in the back of the van with the amps and drums.

The highway was empty, not even any big rigs rumbling down the road, so we smoked another joint. We knew we had a lot of work ahead of us. One of us mentioned that we would need to audition a new drummer.

ALL AGES

BY ALISON GAYLIN

W
E
STARTED
WITH
THE
HAIR
. Bret said that was where all adventures started—
Great hair, great music, great buzz.
And so the first thing we did on the night of the all-ages X show at The Whisky was to lock ourselves in her upstairs bathroom with two cans of Aqua Net, three boxes of Midnight Raven temporary dye, and an assortment of pics and combs, gels whose names I can no longer remember but whose colors I do—battery acid green, radioactive yellow. . . . Each of them with an epoxy-like consistency and a sickly chemical smell. We teased the mercy out of each other's hair and took swigs from a bottle of peach schnapps we'd found at the back of her parents' liquor cabinet and we played X albums—
Under the Big Black Sun
,
Los Angeles
, some bootleg tape recorded live at one of their local shows. Bret's trifecta in action. And it was working. Exene's steely voice grew more and more beautiful with each gulp of schnapps, John Doe's growl a cloud I could float on. My hair turned stiff and black and defiant and before long I was a star, a punk rock star. I felt like dancing.

We were sixteen years old. It was my first show at any Hollywood club, and to my San Gabriel Valley mind there was no Hollywood club more punk rock than The Whisky. Bret's parents had gone out that night. Even though they thought we were simply having a sleepover, they'd left behind wheels—the Karmann Ghia that used to belong to Bret's older sister, broken down for years but recently restored to working condition. “Use the car only if there's an emergency, girls,” her mom had said. And we'd managed to keep straight faces. Both of us.

When we were done with the hair, Bret and I looked in the mirror. Dueling Exenes stared back at us. . . . Well, from the scalp up, anyway. Quickly, we put on our makeup—dead-white skin, blood-red lips. We troweled kohl around our eyes and sucked in our cheeks and winked at our reflections like we were posing for an album cover.

“Now,” Bret said, once we finished. “Now we look like we belong at an X show.”

“We look so different,” I said. I felt different, too—scary and grown-up. Invincible.

I
CAN
TASTE
THE
PEACH
schnapps now. I feel the tacky pull of the gel and spray in my soft, sensible hair thirty years later as I approach Bret's coffin. I can't figure out why I'm experiencing the memory this palpably, but then I understand. . . . It's the song that's playing over the funeral home's speaker system, so quietly you can barely hear it—moaning vocals over a jangly, urgent guitar riff, two chords like footsteps moving closer. An X song. “Johnny Hit and Run Paulene.”

“Why, Bret?” I say it out loud, even though I've come to the wake alone. I feel a small hand on my back and turn to see a sweet-faced lady of about my mother's age, steel-gray hair shaped into a shiny bob, lips a neat red slash. She smells of jasmine, a scent my own mother used to favor when she was alive, and for a moment, I truly am sixteen again, about to embark on my first and last adventure and everything that came with it.

“Some things,” the woman says, “are just unfair.”

She is talking about Bret dying at just forty-six of course, about Bret's mother outliving both her daughters. She's talking about the nature of Bret's death—a suicide by pills, just like her older sister's thirty-five years earlier. All of it unfair, yes. But that isn't what had made me ask why. It had been the song.

“They did a lovely job with her makeup,” another woman offers. She's a bit younger—my age, maybe. She's wearing a chic black suit and heels, chunky custard-colored highlights in her ash-blond hair.

“Yes,” I lie. “She looks beautiful.”

It's an open casket. Bret is lying on her back, arms crossed over her chest like Snow White in her glass coffin. She's wearing an ivory dress with a high collar, under a hairstyle I'd be shocked if she had ever favored in life. People change, of course. I only knew Bret as a teen, a lifetime ago, and I understand this. But still there is something about the way her body looks, the enforced primness. The way it has been styled beyond her control, her hands arranged. . . .

I remember her telling me how much her sister's wake had scared her—how unfair it was that she'd been forced to look at something that was no longer Trina, just a stiff outer covering, painted to look human, posed like a doll.
Trina's shell
, she had called the body. I remember this. I can hear her say it in my head and it makes my throat clench up. A tear slips down my cheek.

“Did you know her well?” says the custard-streaked woman.

“I haven't seen her in a long time,” I say quietly. “Not since we were kids.”

“Nice of you to come,” she says. “I know Bret from church. We ran the Christmas toy drive together. I had no idea she was so. . . . She always seemed quite happy, actually.” She gives me a probing look, introduces herself as Georgette.

“I'm Lara.”

“Her mother's over there.” Georgette gestures at a delicate woman standing at the far end of Bret's coffin, talking to a big bear of a man who keeps shaking his head. She peers up at him, says something. It looks like “thank you.” Though her hair is white and cropped close now, Mrs. Raines otherwise is much the same as I remember her. Very small, with sharp features, a tiny pointed nose that looks as though it was pinched from clay.

She's full of tension, always has been. Squinting eyes, pursed lips. Hands that keep clutching each other. I think about Bret's father, how hard he'd try to smile. “Have fun, kids!” he'd said once after dropping us off at a movie, “Don't get into trouble!” I used to wonder what they had been like before their older daughter had died, if they had ever been able to relax their faces or if they'd always been this tense, as though they were bracing for a fall. Mr. Raines was dead now too, according to Bret's obituary.

“Bret should have had children,” Georgette is saying. “Single women adopt all the time.”

I turn to her. “Do you think children would have made her happy?”

She shrugs “It would have been something.”

I have no idea what that means.

We weren't Facebook friends, Bret and me. We have never sent each other Christmas cards. She wasn't invited to my wedding, and I wasn't invited to either of hers. I have two boys now, aged twelve and fifteen. I have no idea if she knew this about me; if she had ever seen the birth announcements I sent to our school's alumni magazine.

“Who is Bret Raines?” my husband said yesterday morning, when he saw me reading her obituary online.

Married twenty years, he's never once heard me say her name.

“We used to be friends,” I said.

B
RET
AND
I
HAD
MET
at the beginning of junior year. She'd come to my town from Beverly Hills, four years after her older sister's suicide—a news event that had made the papers because of her family. Her dad was a producer who'd worked with some of the top names in Hollywood. And so, even though we high schoolers from Pasadena might not have remembered the story from when it happened, our parents had. By the time the school year started, we all knew about the tragic Raines family and how they were escaping to our quiet town to build a new life.

Death is so attractive when you're young, so romantic and rare. And Bret was beautiful—a golden California girl—which added to the allure. Senior boys stared after her, the popular girls in our class passed her notes, inviting her to parties. Everyone wanted to help her, to talk to her, to be her friend. But for some reason, she spoke only to me.

Our last names were close—that was part of it. Hers was Raines, mine Ramsey, and so we sat next to each other in homeroom. But really it was more the way we looked at the world—both of us bored, bookish, not very happy. “Is this place as lame as it seems?” she had said to me on the first day of school.

“Lamer,” I'd replied. And things had taken off from there.

That first Friday after school, she had invited me to her house. I'd expected some kind of castle, celebrity that she was. But really, it was just a clean, two-story house a lot like mine. All over the living room, there were pictures of Bret—as a toddler in a ballet outfit, in a puffy white dress at a debutante party, in a Girl Scout sash dotted with merit badges, as Wonder Woman for Halloween. A couple of shots of Bret's parents, too, but nothing of her dead sister. You'd think she was an only child.

After dinner, she'd taken me up to her room and pulled a box out from under her bed. Inside were several pictures of a girl with huge brown eyes and silky, pale blond hair like Bret's own. In one, the girl was about seven and held a toddler Bret in her arms. In another, she was in a formal dress, standing stiffly beside a dark-haired boy much shorter than herself. In one of the more recent ones, she'd shaved off part of her hair and wore a ripped T-shirt held together by safety pins and heavy, Cleopatra-like eyeliner. A punk-rocker.

“My mom thinks she threw all of these pictures out, but I stole 'em out of the trash. They're all I have left of her.”

The night of the X concert, I was aware of that box under Bret's bed as we put on the bad-girl clothes we'd bought at a thrift store the previous week. I kept wondering what Trina would think of us, sneaking around like this without her parents knowing, wearing fake leather skirts that we'd hidden in the back of Bret's closet. I hoped she would approve. I didn't have a sister of my own and so the closer Bret and I became, the more I began to think of Trina as my sister too—a guardian spirit watching over everything we did, approving and disapproving. Helping us. Trina's favorite movie had been
Somewhere in Time
. Her favorite book,
Forever
. She had discovered punk rock when she was sixteen, like us. As with us, the music had saved her from the boredom of growing up. She loved the screaming, the swearing, the impatience of the sound. Her favorite bands had been the Dead Kennedys, Black Flag and, most of all, X. I knew these things about Trina because Bret had told me, doling out each piece of information quietly, reverently, unwrapping them for me like gifts.

Trina had taken all those pills because a boy had hurt her terribly. I didn't know the details. But Bret wanted revenge. We both wanted revenge.
It's my whole life's purpose
, Bret would say.
And you're the only one who knows it
.

Once we were all dressed, I crouched down, looking for the box, thinking maybe I could get a clue as to how Trina would feel about what we were doing if I looked hard enough at the face in the Mohawk photo. Most punk rockers scowled in pictures, but in that shot—a shot taken by the hurtful boy—Trina had been smiling.

“It's gone,” Bret said.

“Huh?”

“The box,” she said. “It's gone. My mom found it.”

I pulled myself to my feet. “Oh no,” I said. “Oh Bret.”

But she was busy gazing into her full-length mirror, examining herself from every angle. “You know what, Lara?”

“What?”

“I don't think I've ever had a better friend than you.”

Beneath the caked-on makeup, my skin warmed. “Same here,” I said.

Bret took another pull off the bottle of peach schnapps and handed it to me, her words slurring a little. “You ready for our adventure?” she said.

I took a big swig. It tasted like furniture polish. “You bet your ass,” I said. We both started laughing.

T
HE
MEMORY
GROWS
STRONGER
IN
my mind as I kneel in front of Bret's coffin—the heat of the alcohol in my throat, the feel of fishnet stockings and a too-tight skirt, the way everything blurred and my words slurred and I weaved on my feet. The dizziness of that night. The thrill.

This song is about a drug that makes guys need to have sex every hour.

I hear Bret's voice in my head, that song playing on and on in the funeral home like it did on the tape deck of Trina's Karmann Ghia as it sped along the Pasadena Freeway on its way to the X show back in 1984. I feel as though I'm trapped in time. I shut my eyes tight, wishing somebody would turn it off. “To shoot all Paulenes between the legs,” John Doe sings. I remember Bret saying, “He thinks all girls are named Paulene” and I can't even think enough to pray.

“Lara? Lara Ramsey?”

I know Bret's mother's voice. It sounds the same. I'm surprised she recognizes me. I'm glad I'm here without my family because I don't want them to see me like this, reacting this way. But it feels so strange, being here at all.

I stand, move toward her. “Mrs. Raines I'm so sorry.” I say it too loudly, trying to drown out the song.

“God, it's been such a long time.” She hugs me. I feel her ribs through her black linen dress. “How did you find out?”

“Facebook,” I say. “Our high school has a page and it posted her obituary.”

“Technology.”

“Yes.” There is an envelope in my purse, Bret's name on the return address. It came in the mail after I saw the obituary and I haven't been able to open it. I have no idea what it could be, but the possibility scares me. The timing. She had to have sent it right before taking the pills.

I came here to the wake because I thought it might give me the strength to open the envelope. I thought it might give me some closure. But I can't tell that to Mrs. Raines. I can't tell her about the envelope and anyway I hate that word. Closure.

“There's something I need to ask you, Lara,” she says.

I swallow hard, taste bile in my throat. I may as well be sixteen again. It may as well be the day after. “Yes?”