Whale Music (9 page)

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world, Des.”

“Yours or mine?”

“Huh?”

“Tell me about Toronto.”

“Well, it’s a lot like it is down here. It’s got some nice parts, some shitty parts.” Claire turns over on her side, leaning close to me, and excitement sparks in her eyes. “I’ll tell you the best and the worst thing about Toronto, Des. The best thing is that it’s got more seagulls than anywhere in the universe. We got billions and billions of the little dudes. There’s this place called the Leslie Street Spit, and you can walk down there and see nothing but gulls. And I like to do that, don’t ask me why. And the very
worst
thing about it is that everybody thinks this is a big problem. They say that seagulls are stinky, smelly birds, and people want to poison all the gull eggs and turn snakes and mongeese and hawks loose on the Spit. And when I hear people talk like this, I get mad. I think, hey, slime-bucket, if
these seagulls are so bad, why did God make so fucking many of them? Don’t you think He knows what He’s doing?”

“He makes a lot of everything,” I point out. “That may be His way of compensating for engineering and design flaws.”

“Weird Desmond,” laughs Claire. “He only made the one of you, babe.”

“Torque Torque” was a local hit. It was a hit because the father shoved it down the throat of every disc jockey he could find. It was a hit because, as Kenny Sexstone noted, the youthful record-buying public was very much concerned with automobiles. It was a hit because the young Danny took a good picture, because he looked like a greaseball that would be polite to your mother. It was a hit, in part, because it was a good tune.

We were the Howl Brothers, the names Des and Danny bracketed underneath on the forty-five. The triumvirate—the father, Maurice Mantle and Kenny Sexstone—decided that we needed a band, that the Howl Brothers had to play live in order to promote the record. They decided to accent our youth, auditioning only people between the ages of fifteen and eighteen.

The drummer they found was a small, dark-skinned boy named Sal Goneau. His hair-do was something to see, a shiny and intricate sculpture that always looked like it was about to slide off Sally’s head. Sal had a face like a bird, a nose that could be used as a letter-opener. He wore his shirt open to the navel as if proud of the fact that a swarthy Latin type like himself
could have not a single solitary hair growing anywhere on his person (except for the precarious bouffant perched atop his noggin). Sal wasn’t a very technically competent drummer, but he was awesomely mechanical. Once he got into a groove there was no stopping the lad. I’d pit Sal against a metronome any day of the week and bet good money that the machine broke time before Sally did.

On bass we had Dewey Moore. Dewey is doing well these days, isn’t he, I believe he was recently voted Country and Western Artist of the Year. And I likewise believe he’s in the Guinness Book of World Records for most marriages. When I first saw him he hadn’t any of this silver-haired dignity for which he is so widely regarded. He was a scrawny, leather-jacketed man with his four-day beard doing a re-enactment of the Civil War. Dewey’s eyes were red and ringed like Saturn. He walked into the auditioning room dragging his bass dolefully. A cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth, little flecks of what looked like vomit spotted his filthy jeans. The triumvirate regarded him sceptically. Finally Maurice asked, “How old are you?”

Dewey removed the cigarette from his mouth and spoke. His voice sounded like someone was making mud pies in Hell. “Sixteen,” Dewey croaked, and then he strapped on his instrument and commenced to play.

He got the job, mostly because not a lot of bass players showed up that day.

The guitarist was, as you probably know, Monty Mann, he of the quote-unquote Californian good looks. What was Californian about his good looks is beyond me. I think of California as ruggedly beautiful, redwoods, jagged coastlines, Big Sur, etc. Monty had a tiny nose, a tiny mouth, tiny ears. I couldn’t look at him without imagining God creating Monty Mann, mincing around like a hairdresser and exclaiming, “Too cute for words!” Danny took a glance at Monty and hated him. I didn’t hate Monty, but I did think he was a lousy guitar player, ruthlessly dragging slothful quarter notes out of his Telecaster,
pulling and working at them like they were goobers stuck up some musical nostril.

The father attended the rehearsals regularly, but he didn’t seem at all concerned with our musical progress. Instead, he’d show up with wardrobe ideas. Where he was getting these “costumes,” I’ll never know. We never had to make a firm veto on any of them because the father was quick to change his own mind. “Naw,” he’d holler as soon as we were all uniformly attired. “No schnooze.” The other thing the father had in abundance was ideas on hair. “You’re all gonna dye your hair white!”

Sal Goneau shivered at this prospect. Dewey Moore’s hair gave the impression that it would fight off tampering of its own volition. Monty’s hair was close to being white anyhow, and replacing God-given bleach with a bottled brand was to him repugnant. This is the first true fight we had with the father, Danny leading the attack.

“No way,” he said.

“I’m the boss!” screamed the father.

“No way,” repeated Dan.

“I
made
you!” The father was perhaps referring to the two doggedly relentless bits of sperm that had produced my brother and myself. This was not the last time we would hear this peculiar claim.

“We are not dyeing our hair,” Danny said with finality.

The father crossed quickly to Danny and slapped him twice on the face. Danny then reared back and caught the father with a roundhouse, laying him out on his duff. I picked the father up, whispered that I would be willing to dye my hair. He said, “Who cares?” and stormed out. The incident was never mentioned again.

Our first gig was in some swank nightclub high in the Hollywood Hills. The father had an unclear notion as to where the Howl Brothers’ audience was, although we could have told him they weren’t in this velvet and chrome emporium into
which people pranced from the golf courses and tennis courts.

Setting up took twenty minutes. It’s funny to think that in a few years we would be having to fly our equipment to a city two days in advance of a concert, that we would have no less than three road crews in our employ, three complete sets of sound systems. Back then, we just had tiny tube amplifiers, little boxes that hummed discordantly.

The patrons eyed us with suspicion. They winced as we tested our instruments. I played a sweet little major C triad and they winced. Sal patted out an inoffensive paradiddle and they winced. Monty strummed G, the chord of the singing cowboys, and they winced. So Dewey dropped a note in their laps that sounded like an elephant voiding last night’s dinner. Their faces froze in rictuses of terror. Danny grabbed the microphone, pulled it out of its holder and said, “We’re the Howl Brothers.” He gave the count and we launched into “Torque Torque”.

Until then, rock and roll songs had threatened only that the young people would dance a lot. The worst that might happen, according to the tunes, is that the young people might stay up all night. We were different. Our songs threatened
mobilization
, we were going to climb into powerful machines and actually go out on search-and-destroy missions! No wonder the older people fished the fruit out of their cocktails and hurled it in our direction. Likewise that their children made for the stage like it was Valhalla. Danny was doing his thing, his hands twisted in the air, his head shyly buried into his chest. The kids started doing this too, it became quite the rage, you know, this dance of awkwardness and crippled emotions.

The triumvirate were there, of course. The father was sure we were ruining our chances, he hollered at us to break out the schnoozy tunes. He wrote requests on cocktail napkins and had waitresses ferry them up to the stage, and although he changed his handwriting on every one, I had him spotted. Not many other people were likely to request “Vivian in Velvet.” Maurice Mantle was there, wearing a three-piece pin-stripe
that looked like he’d borrowed it from God, who was exactly the same size. Kenny Sexstone grinned like the Vienna Boys Choir had gone co-ed and was gathered under the table, chewing him up from the waist down.

Girls stood slack-jawed, mesmerized by either Monty or Danny. The ones who would worry about wrinkling their clothes tended to favour Monty, who looked like his shit came out pressed and folded. Girls without such concerns gazed upwards at Danny, they twisted their bodies in concert with his, they attempted to commingle on some spiritual plane, they made no secret of the fact that immediately after the show things were going to get down and dirty. Dewey Moore grinned from ear to ear, a hound dog who knew that he could feast forever on little scraps from the dinner table.

Among the young girls danced my mother. She didn’t stand out, particularly, her hair was as blonde as theirs, her skin as perfect. Her clothes were sedate—at least the designers had aimed for sedateness—but my mother could shake the booty.
Agh
. Her fanny would bob like helium balloons through the clouds.
Agh. Agh
. Buttons were always working themselves undone, glimpses given of lace brassieres. My mother would kick out, arms aloft, thrust her pelvis,
come and get me soldier and slap some jelly on it!

A photograph exists of that night. It’s in a cookie jar which I deep-sixed in the mighty Pacific several years ago. It shows the dancing crowd, my mother among them, my mother frozen in a position that, whew, merely looking at it would turn you into a pillar of salt, at least throw your back out for a week. My brother Daniel is in essentially the same posture. I’m standing behind my keyboard, looking baffled and bewildered, a visitor from the Dogstar Sirius.

And then, right before we were supposed to play “Jaguar June”, Dan announced, “Hey, everybody, we got a special guest artist tonight.” News to me, news to me. I would grow used to this, why, one night (a few years to come) Jimi Hendrix got up on stage with us and, for reasons of his own, immolated
by flame not only his own guitar but Monty Mann’s as well. “The composer of ‘Vivian in Velvet’…” (I clearly recall thinking,
what a coincidence, someone else has written a song with that same silly name
, and then the horrible truth struck home.) “Mr. Hank Howell!”

The father came prancing on stage with the tenor guitar. Do you know the tenor guitar, the thyroidal ukulele?
Nelson Eddy played the tenor guitar!
The father began, his right hand slapped the contraption’s belly, his left grabbed ahold of the fretboard and throttled. A D-chord, worse, a D-sixth. A D-sixth sounds like a Sunday School teacher farting and then giggling with embarrassment. The chord was strummed limply. Apparently this was a ballad.
All right, all right
, thought I, disdainfully playing the whiny notes. Down to a B-minor, yes, yes, E-minor, oh no, don’t tell me,
ah!
, the A-seventh, the father has plagiarized whatever finned quadruped first emerged from the ooze with a Sears & Roebuck six-string. And then came the lyrics.

The youngsters sat down. The dance floor was empty, save for my mother, who stood staring up at the stage, expressionless. The father attempted to aim a soulful gaze at her, but he ended up squinting like Popeye. And then Maurice Mantle appeared beside her and—with no exchange of word or gesture—they fell into each other’s arms. Mantle placed one of his elegant hands on the small of my mother’s back, the plateau before the valleying of her buttocks.

You dream
, crowed the father,
you indelible dream
.

(Had the thesaurus out again, have we?)

Danny jumped off the stage and tapped Maurice Mantle on the shoulder. Mantle stepped back gallantly, Danny took his spot, the father broke out into a rancid sweat. I did what I could. I added some ninths, anything to soup up the stodgy stew of his progression, I improvised a little counter-melody, I even added some vocals, harmonizing on the snivelling
you dream, I dream, we dream
. But, as we like to say here in the War Zone, damage had been done.