Dead Americans (26 page)

With a faintly murmured thanks, Zarina stepped out of the hatchback. The rain fell heavily onto her jacket, through her dark hair, and splashed into the car. She closed the door and was rewarded with the red brake lights lifting immediately as Emily drove away. Didn’t even stay to see if the door opened—which, when Zarina turned, she found to be incorrect on her part, as it was already open.

In the doorframe of his single wide, Lee Brown looked much as he had on the stage at the Annandale: unshaven, lean, with messy hair. He was wearing black jeans and a black t-shirt, but still had nothing on his feet. In his hands he held a brown towel, which he tossed into her hands as she entered.

“Thanks,” she said, rubbing her face.

“Isn’t a thing,” he replied. “You can hang your jacket up behind you.”

The inside was, essentially, a box. It was covered in a wallpaper of girls in sunflower yellow dresses playing instruments: banjos, guitars, tiny drum kits, harmonicas, and a whole collection of other instruments that looked to be taken out of the sixties. The pattern covered the entire trailer, missing only the small kitchen behind her. The bedroom beyond that—though she couldn’t see the bed, just a beanbag and a red electric guitar, foot pedals, and a small amp—was covered in it too. It was more than a little odd, she thought as she hung her jacket on the wooden rack, and she had no way to even begin explaining it. Drying and warming her bare arms, she turned and glanced into the kitchen again, taking in the stacked plates and empty cans and bottles, and finally came round to Lee, who had cleared space on a cheap table by pushing CDs and tools and strings and small instruments such as harmonicas and kazoos to the side, and was now looking at her with a half hidden
that
kind of look.

Zarina didn’t enjoy it. Mostly, she just ignored guys who looked at her like that, but it was a sharp and unpleasant reminder from Lee, driving home the knowledge that she shouldn’t have agreed to meet him, that she should have realized that his music meant more to her than he—

He was speaking. Shit. She had missed everything he’d said. “Sorry?”

“I was asking if you had any problems with Em?”

“No. She was very nice.”

“She can be a bit . . .” He paused, searched for the word, rubbed at his chin as he did, then said, “Bossy. It’s cool if you found that.”

“I’m fine.”

“Cool. Take a seat.”

Zarina wanted to grab her jacket first, wanted to wrap the wet fabric around her and hide her body in its folds, but she didn’t. Instead, she pulled back the seat and sat down opposite to Lee. His gaze met hers: his eyes were brown with a touch of green and yellow around the centre. The silence between them began to grow uncomfortable and he picked up a silver harmonica from next to his hand and began twisting it end over end. He coughed to clear his throat, said, “I’ve never—you know, never been real good with this stuff.”

Like she was better. “It’s okay.”

“Yeah, I know. It’s just—just—”

“I wouldn’t have picked Emily as your sister,” Zarina interrupted. “You don’t look much like each other.”

“She’s my foster sister.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, her folks took me in when I was about ten.” The silver harmonica settled onto the table, the mouth’s end pointed away from her. “My original family broke up and I was left on my own, and I jumped from foster family to foster family for a while. No one wanted to take me permanently.”

“Why was that?”

“I was angry. I had a lot of problems with school,” he said. “Plus I couldn’t read.”

“Really?”

“Still can’t.”

“You never tried to learn?”

“I could read until I was nine, but then it left me. Figured I was better off.”

He was casual, unashamed, and that surprised Zarina. She had never met anyone who was illiterate before, but she had believed that anyone who couldn’t read would want to keep it a secret. She didn’t know what to say, but watching Lee pick up his harmonica and turn it around again, knew that she had to reply. “That’s . . . odd. Did you ever—you know, see someone about it?”

“Yeah. Mostly they said it was in my head.”

“You think they were right?”

“Not in the way they thought,” he replied. “I know what’s exactly in my head—not that Em’s parents believed that. They just thought I was fucked up. I think she figures it, too, but she looks out for me anyhow. She doesn’t need to, but family, hey? What’s yours like?”

Zarina shifted uncomfortably. He wasn’t looking at her as he had earlier, though she believed that she could still see that in the background. The desire had been overtaken by an invasive quality in his eyes, as if each was trying to dig beneath her skin and pull out her thoughts. “I don’t have much to do with my family.”

“Why?”

“It’s . . .” She hesitated, hated herself for it, hated the pause for what it implied. “It’s a lifestyle choice.”

“You’re a smoker?”

She blushed. “No, I’m—”

“I know,” Lee said, amused. “I got it.”

She laughed to cover her embarrassment and stared at the long scratches in the table as she spoke. They had been made by a knife. “I’m—I’m sorry. I don’t usually meet people like you.”

“Yeah, I try not to come to places like this, either.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“No? You’re not one of those trailer park girls, are you?”

“You’re an idiot.” She raised her head, grinned. “I meant I don’t meet musicians, much. Especially ones who make music I like.”

“Well, thanks for coming.”

“I don’t know why you wanted to see me anyway.”

“It was Emily’s idea, mostly.” Lee pushed back his chair, stood. He dropped the harmonica and snatched up a blue coloured plastic kazoo. “You want a beer?”

“Sure.”

He entered the kitchen and, at the fridge, tapped the kazoo on the door in an incomplete child’s tune (was it ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb?’) as he pulled out two bottles of beer. “I thought I was kind of fucked at the Annandale, you know? Band was gone, I had no more gigs lined up, in a couple of weeks I’d be out of rent. And on top of that, I was playing like I’d never played before. It felt good playing it, but I didn’t think the audience liked it much—what audience there was, I guess. Then about a month later I started getting these calls to play. Calls from bars and venues that I’d never heard of.”

He placed the slick brown bottle in front of her, the kazoo tapping against his own glass as he did. He was repeating the opening of the tune, never completing it. “I did the shows, and at each one the audience kept growing, and I kept getting more calls. I had no idea why until after one show when this guy shows with a CD he’s bought of the Annandale gig.”

“A CD?” Zarina interrupted.

“Yeah, I thought he bought it off you.”

“No,” she said emphatically. “I don’t sell anything. The live shows on my site are free. I don’t sell it. Making money out of it changes it.”

Lee sat. “Don’t change it for me,” he said, his bottle opening with a hiss.

“It does. People are making off you and you’re not seeing any of it, whereas my site, it’s sharing the music that people enjoy. There’s no money involved—it’s just because everyone shares the interest.”

“You’re a bootlegger, right?”

“I make bootlegs,” she corrected. “I don’t sell bootlegs.”

“The difference in that is just passing me by.” He spun the bottle cap across the table. “You’re living in a world I don’t even want to know.”

Zarina’s bottle hissed open. “Look, downloading, bootlegging, it’s just not simple right or wrong. Nothing’s like that.”

“Hey, I’m not fussed.” Lee’s blue kazoo rose into the air with his hands in an exaggerated comic gesture of hands off. He grinned. “I’m getting gigs. I don’t care if someone is making a couple of dollars.”

“You should care.”

“Yeah, so I hear,” he said, lowering his hands. “It’s what Emily said.”

“She’s right. If someone is making money off you, you deserve some. Most people don’t want to take money from a musician of your level, so they’d rather pay to support you. Some aren’t like that, of course, but people do things for a lot of different reasons.”

Lee nodded, but he looked uncomfortable, so she added, “I’ll put a notice on my website, saying there are no authorized copies for sale out there. You can even start a PayPal account if you want.”

“You’re losing me now.”

“Lot of people download the Annandale show. I can put up a notice saying you need rent, and they’ll give you a bit of money. Help you get by.”

He twisted in his chair, agitated. “That’s not—”

“It’s no problem,” Zarina said, keeping casual. “People do it all the time.”

“That’s—I’m not—look—”

His voice broke off suddenly and his head dropped into his hands. Zarina called his name, but there was no response; slowly, she reached forward and touched his shoulder but, again, no response. Lee had just shut down. That was the only way to explain it, and because she could hear his breathing, she wasn’t quite yet panicking. Still, she had seen it in his face as he fell into his hands, and watched as the life behind his eyes disappeared like a light being switched off. Around her, the images of girls in sunflower yellow dresses stared outwards, the instruments they held in their hands having more in common with weapons than devices that created music.

His head still in his hands, Lee said quietly, “I can’t talk business. I just—I just cannot do that, okay?”

“Okay,” she said softly. “Whatever suits you.”

“It’s not that I don’t care, it’s just I got to keep focused.” His head rose, and in his gaze Zarina saw a sense of fatigue that his previous liveliness had hidden. “If I lose focus, I become something else.”

“Okay.”

“You don’t understand.”

“No.”
How could she?

“Like I said, I could read. Once. When I was a kid. I loved reading. When I was nine, I read everything that I could get my hands on, and when I was finished with a book, I would start writing my own stories. Just inspired to make my own, you know?” His fingers placed the blue kazoo on the table and began to pull out a guitar string, the movement causing albums to slide over the table. Lee didn’t notice. “But then, one day, I found music. My dad showed me how to play a little tune on a piano. Nothing big. A nursery rhyme. But the sound—the way it made me feel, it was like nothing else I’d ever experienced. It was creation like I had never been involved in before, and after that, nothing was comparable. It was love. I could find it in every musical instrument I picked up, as if it were lingering in the wood or metal waiting for me, and I pushed the words and books out of my head to make room for the music.”

There was no awareness of reality in Lee’s gaze. He was telling his story and he believed everything that he said. Zarina, however, was not important to it; he could have been telling it to anyone. But while he lingered on the music, she lingered on the details of Lee’s father and what had really happened. It was the broken bit of the story, the edge that she could peel back to learn the secrets, but she knew—without questioning—that Lee Brown was incapable of doing that. It was when Zarina realized this that what she feared would happen, did, and in one quiet moment, the purity of his music was lost. She became detached, sympathetic, and sorry; aware that whenever she played theleeharveyoswaldband after this moment, the image of a young boy being abused by his father would be all that she could think of.

“You don’t believe me,” he said, the cord wrapping around his fist. “I can see that you don’t.”

“It’s not a question of that,” she replied gently.

“I’ve not slept for eighteen years.”

“What?”

“If I sleep, I will lose what’s inside my head. I will lose
myself
.”

“That won’t happen.”

“It will.” Gripping the cord tightly in his left fist, he reached into the mess of instruments and albums on the table to his right, and from beneath it all pulled out a flat envelope that she had not seen. It was old and yellowed and creased and had the words
Lee Brown
written upon it in faded red ink. “The proof is in here.”

Why do you think that Brown kept using the band name?

He loved the name. Just loved it. I asked him where he got it from once, and he said, “Me and the dead President have a lot in common.”

That’s all?

It was the only one he ever gave.

Still, I think theleeharveyoswaldband suited Brown and Malik more than it did when I was there. Kennedy’s death signalled a change in American politics, and theleeharveyoswaldband did the same thing for American music.

You really think that?

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think Malik made this culture of downloading, but she’s become the figurehead for it. With theleeharveyoswaldband she’s given it a credibility like it never had before.

She knows it, too. You just have to read her interviews, listen to her on talk shows, whatever. She talks up the net and bootlegging and the creative commons copyright like a guru. You think of this stuff and you think of her. It’s not surprising that she’s become a hub for new bands, and that large labels have tried to bring her up on criminal charges.

I was reading an interview with executives from Sony the other day, and they were calling her dangerous and misguided.

That’s suits for you.

In truth, the corporate level has nothing to fear from Malik right now. She’s publicly said that she hasn’t moved more than a hundred thousand copies from the millions of downloads that have been made of the Annandale recording, and that’s her best seller. When you compare that to a giant label that will move five million copies of an album from a high profile act, it’s nothing.

But Malik isn’t a problem. Neither is downloading. Suits’ll just say that so they don’t have to approach the real problem, and that’s that their business model isn’t producing long-term acts, and what acts they do produce have no loyalty to the shareholders and company brand names. More and more bands with an established audience are leaving to become independent. I mean, shit, Hanson did it. Can you believe that?