The Stand Page 6

  His mind began to drift away again, mulling over the last nine weeks or so, trying to find some sort of key that would make everything clear and explain how you could butt yourself against stone walls for six long years, playing the clubs, making demo tapes, doing sessions, the whole bit, and then suddenly make it in nine weeks. Trying to get that straight in your mind was like trying to swallow a doorknob. There had to be an answer, he thought, an explanation that would allow him to reject the ugly notion that the whole thing had been a whim, a simple twist of fate, in Dylan's words.

  He dozed deeper, arms crossed on his chest, going over it and over it, and mixed up in all of it was this new thing, like a low and sinister counterpoint, one note at the threshold of audibility played on a synthesizer, heard in a migrainy sort of way that acted on you like a premonition: the rat, digging into the dead cat's body, munch, munch, just looking for something tasty here. It's the law of the jungle, my man, if you're in the trees you got to swing ...

  It had really started eighteen months ago. He had been playing with the Tattered Remnants in a Berkeley club, and a man from Columbia had called. Not a biggie, just another toiler in the vinyl vineyards. Neil Diamond was thinking of recording one of his songs, a tune called "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?"

  Diamond was doing an album, all his own stuff except for an old Buddy Holly tune, "Peggy Sue Got Married," and maybe this Larry Underwood tune. The question was, would Larry like to come up and cut a demo of the tune, then sit in on the session? Diamond wanted a second acoustic guitar, and he liked the tune a lot.

  Larry said yes.

  The session lasted three days. It was a good one. Larry met Neil Diamond, also Robbie Robertson, also Richard Perry. He got mention on the album's inner sleeve and got paid union scale. But "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?" never made the album. On the second evening of the session, Diamond had come up with a new tune of his own and that made the album instead.

  Well, the man from Columbia said, that's too bad. It happens. Tell you what--why don't you cut the demo anyway. I'll see if there's anything I can do. So Larry cut the demo and then found himself back out on the street. In L.A. times were hard. There were a few sessions, but not many.

  He finally got a job playing guitar in a supper club, crooning things like "Softly as I Leave You" and "Moon River" while elderly cats talked business and sucked up Italian food. He wrote the lyrics on scraps of notepaper, because otherwise he tended to mix them up or forget them altogether, chording the tune while he went "hmmmm-hmmmm, ta-da-hmmmm, " trying to look suave like Tony Bennett vamping and feeling like an asshole. In elevators and supermarkets he had become morbidly aware of the low Muzak that played constantly.

  Then, nine weeks ago and out of the blue, the man from Columbia had called. They wanted to release his demo as a single. Could he come in and back it? Sure, Larry said. He could do that. So he had gone into Columbia's L.A. studios on a Sunday afternoon, double-tracked his own voice on "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?" in about an hour, and then backed it with a song he had written for the Tattered Remnants, "Pocket Savior." The man from Columbia presented him with a check for five hundred dollars and a stinker of a contract that bound Larry to more than it did the record company. He shook Larry's hand, told him it was good to have him aboard, offered him a small, pitying smile when Larry asked him how the single would be promoted, and then took his leave. It was too late to deposit the check, so Larry ran through his repertoire at Gino's with it in his pocket. Near the end of his first set, he sang a subdued version of "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?" The only person who noticed was Gino's proprietor, who told him to save the nigger bebop for the cleanup crew.

  Seven weeks ago, the man from Columbia called again and told him to go get a copy of Billboard. Larry ran. "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?" was one of three hot prospects for that week. Larry called the man from Columbia back, and he had asked Larry how he would like to lunch with some of the real biggies. To discuss the album. They were all pleased with the single, which was getting airplay in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Portland, Maine, already. It looked as if it was going to catch. It had won a late-night Battle of the Sounds contest for four nights running on one Detroit soul station. No one seemed to know that Larry Underwood was white.

  He had gotten drunk at the luncheon and hardly noticed how his salmon tasted. No one seemed to mind that he had gotten loaded. One of the biggies said he wouldn't be surprised to see "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?" carry off a Grammy next year. It all rang gloriously in Larry's ears. He felt like a man in a dream, and going back to his apartment he felt strangely sure that he would be hit by a truck and that would end it all. The Columbia biggies had presented him with another check, this one for $2,500. When he got home, Larry picked up the telephone and began to make calls. The first one was to Mort "Gino" Green. Larry told him he'd have to find someone else to play "Yellow Bird" while the customers ate his lousy undercooked pasta. Then he called everyone he could think of, including Barry Grieg of the Remnants. Then he went out and got standing-up falling-down drunk.

  Five weeks ago the single had cracked Billboard's Hot One Hundred. Number eighty-nine. With a bullet. That was the week spring had really come to Los Angeles, and on a bright and sparkling May afternoon, with the buildings so white and the ocean so blue that they could knock your eyes out and send them rolling down your cheeks like marbles, he had heard his record on the radio for the first time. Three or four friends were there, including his current girl, and they were moderately done up on cocaine. Larry was coming out of the kitchenette and into the living room with a bag of Toll House cookies when the familiar KLMT slogan -- Nyoooooo ... meee-USIC!--came on. And then Larry had been transfixed by the sound of his own voice coming out of the Technics speakers:

  "I know I didn't say I was comin down,

  I know you didn't know I was here in town,

  But bay-yay-yaby you can tell me if anyone can,

  Baby, can you dig your man?

  He's a righteous man,

  Tell me baby, can you dig your man?"

  "Jesus, that's me," he had said. He dropped the cookies onto the floor and then stood gape-mouthed and stone-flabbergasted as his friends applauded.

  Four weeks ago his tune had jumped to seventy-three on the Billboard chart. He began to feel as if he had been pushed rudely into an old-time silent movie where everything was moving too fast. The phone rang off the hook. Columbia was screaming for the album, wanting to capitalize on the single's success. Some crazy rat's ass of an A & R man called three times in one day, telling him he had to get in to Record One, not now but yesterday, and record a remake of the McCoys' "Hang On, Sloopy" as the follow-up. Monster! this moron kept shouting. Only follow-up that's possible, Lar! (He had never met this guy and already he wasn't even Larry but Lar.) It'll be a monster! I mean a fucking monster!

  Larry at last lost his patience and told the monster-shouter that, given a choice between recording "Hang On, Sloopy" and being tied down and receiving a Coca-Cola enema, he would pick the enema. Then he hung up.

  The train kept rolling just the same. Assurances that this could be the biggest record in five years poured into his dazed ears. Agents called by the dozen. They all sounded hungry. He began to take uppers, and it seemed to him that he heard his song everywhere. One Saturday morning he heard it on "Soul Train" and spent the rest of the day trying to make himself believe that, yes, that had actually happened.

  It became suddenly hard to separate himself from Julie, the girl he had been dating since his gig at Gino's. She introduced him to all sorts of people, few of them people he really wanted to see. Her voice began to remind him of the prospective agents he heard over the telephone. In a long, loud, acrimonious argument, he split with her. She had screamed at him that his head would soon be too big to fit through a recording studio door, that he owed her five hundred dollars for dope, that he was the 1990s' answer to Zagar and Evans. She had threatened to kill herself. Afterward Larry felt as if he had been through a long
pillow-fight in which all the pillows had been treated with a low-grade poison gas.

  They had begun cutting the album three weeks ago, and Larry had withstood most of the "for your own good" suggestions. He used what leeway the contract gave him. He got three of the Tattered Remnants-- Barry Grieg, Al Spellman, and Johnny McCall--and two other musicians he had worked with in the past, Neil Goodman and Wayne Stukey. They cut the album in nine days, absolutely all the studio time they could get. Columbia seemed to want an album based on what they thought would be a twenty-week career, beginning with "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?" and ending with "Hang On, Sloopy." Larry wanted more.

  The album cover was a photo of Larry in an old-fashioned clawfoot tub full of suds. Written on the tiles above him in a Columbia secretary's lipstick were the words POCKET SAVIOR and LARRY UNDERWOOD. Columbia had wanted to call the album Baby, Can You Dig Your Man? but Larry absolutely balked, and they had finally settled for a CONTAINS THE HIT SINGLE sticker on the shrink-wrap.

  Two weeks ago the single hit number forty-seven, and the party had started. He had rented a Malibu beachhouse for a month, and after that things got a little hazy. People wandered in and out, always more of them. He knew some, but mostly they were strangers. He could remember being huckstered by even more agents who wanted to "further his great career." He could remember a girl who had bum-tripped and gone screaming down the bone-white beach as naked as a nuthatch. He could remember snorting coke and chasing it with tequila. He could remember being shaken awake on Saturday morning, it must have been a week or so ago, to hear Kasey Kasem spin his record as a debut song at number thirty-six on "American Top Forty." He could remember taking a great many reds and, vaguely, dickering for the Datsun Z with a four-thousand-dollar royalty check that had come in the mail.

  And then it was June 13, six days ago, the day Wayne Stukey asked Larry to go for a walk with him down the beach. It had only been nine in the morning but the stereo was on, both TVs, and it sounded like an orgy was going on in the basement playroom. Larry had been sitting in an overstuffed living room chair, wearing only underpants, and trying owlishly to get the sense from a Superboy comic book. He felt very alert, but none of the words seemed to connect to anything. There was no gestalt. A Wagner piece was thundering from the quad speakers, and Wayne had to shout three or four times to make himself understood. Then Larry nodded. He felt as if he could walk for miles.

  But when the sunlight struck Larry's eyeballs like needles, he suddenly changed his mind. No walk. Uh-uh. His eyes had been turned into magnifying glasses, and soon the sun would shine through them long enough to set his brains on fire. His poor old brains felt tinder-dry.

  Wayne, gripping his arm firmly, insisted. They went down to the beach, over the warming sand to the darker brown hardpack, and Larry decided it had been a pretty good idea after all. The deepening sound of the breakers coming home was soothing. A gull, working to gain altitude, hung straining in the blue sky like a sketched white letter M.

  Wayne tugged his arm firmly. "Come on."

  Larry got all the miles he had felt he could walk. Except that he no longer felt that way. He had an ugly headache and his spine felt as if it had turned to glass. His eyeballs were pulsing and his kidneys ached dully. An amphetamine hangover is not as painful as the morning after the night you got through a whole fifth of Four Roses, but it is not as pleasant as, say, balling Raquel Welch would be. If he had another couple of uppers, he could climb neatly on top of this eight-ball that wanted to run him down. He reached in his pocket to get them and for the first time became aware that he was clad only in skivvies that had been fresh three days ago.

  "Wayne, I wanna go back."

  "Let's walk a little more." He thought that Wayne was looking at him strangely, with a mixture of exasperation and pity.

  "No, man, I only got my shorts on. I'll get picked up for indecent exposure."

  "On this part of the coast you could wrap a bandanna around your wingwang and let your balls hang free and still not get picked up for indecent exposure. Come on, man."

  "I'm tired," Larry said querulously. He began to feel pissed at Wayne. This was Wayne's way of getting back at him, because Larry had a hit and he, Wayne, only had a keyboard credit on the new album. He was no different than Julie. Everybody hated him now. Everyone had the knife out. His eyes blurred with easy tears.

  "Come on, man," Wayne repeated, and they struck off up the beach again.

  They had walked perhaps another mile when double cramps struck the big muscles in Larry's thighs. He screamed and collapsed onto the sand. It felt as if twin stilettos had been planted in his flesh at the same instant.

  "Cramps!" he screamed. "Oh man, cramps!"

  Wayne squatted beside him and pulled his legs out straight. The agony hit again, and then Wayne went to work, hitting the knotted muscles, kneading them. At last the oxygen-starved tissues began to loosen.

  Larry, who had been holding his breath, began to gasp. "Oh man," he said. "Thanks. That was ... that was bad."

  "Sure," Wayne said, without much sympathy. "I bet it was, Larry. How are you now?"

  "Okay. But let's just sit, huh? Then we'll go back."

  "I want to talk to you. I had to get you out here and I wanted you straight enough so you could understand what I was laying on you."

  "What's that, Wayne?" He thought: Here it comes. The pitch. But what Wayne said seemed so far from a pitch that for a moment he was back with the Superboy comic, trying to make sense of a six-word sentence.

  "The party's got to end, Larry."

  "Huh?"

  "The party. When you go back. You pull all the plugs, give everybody their car keys, thank everyone for a lovely time, and see them out the front door. Get rid of them."

  "I can't do that!" Larry said, shocked.

  "You better," Wayne said.

  "But why? Man, this party's just getting going!"

  "Larry, how much has Columbia paid you up front?"

  "Why would you want to know?" Larry asked slyly.

  "Do you think I want to suck off you, Larry? Think."

  Larry thought, and with dawning bewilderment he realized there was no reason why Wayne Stukey would want to put the arm on him. He hadn't really made it yet, was scuffling for jobs like most of the people who had helped Larry cut the album, but unlike most of them, Wayne came from a family with money and he was on good terms with his people. Wayne's father owned half of the country's third-largest electronic games company, and the Stukeys had a modestly palatial home in Bel Air. Bewildered, Larry realized that his own sudden good fortune probably looked like small bananas to Wayne.

  "No, I guess not," he said gruffly. "I'm sorry. But it seems like every tinhorn cockroach-chaser west of Las Vegas--"

  "So how much?"

  Larry thought it over. "Seven grand up front. All told."

  "They're paying you quarterly royalties on the single and biannually on the album?"

  "Right."

  Wayne nodded. "They hold it until the eagle screams, the bastards. Cigarette?"

  Larry took one and cupped the end for a light.

  "Do you know how much this party's costing you?"

  "Sure," Larry said.

  "You didn't rent the house for less than a thousand."

  "Yeah, that's right." It had actually been $1,200 plus a $500 damage deposit. He had paid the deposit and half the month's rent, a total of $1,100 with $600 owing.

  "How much for dope?" Wayne asked.

  "Aw, man, you got to have something. It's like cheese for Ritz crackers--"

  "There was pot and there was coke. How much, come on?"

  "The fucking DA," Larry said sulkily. "Five hundred and five hundred. "

  "And it was gone the second day."

  "The hell it was!" Larry said, startled. "I saw two bowls when we went out this morning, man. Most of it was gone, yeah, but--"

  "Man, don't you remember the Deck?" Wayne's voice suddenly dropped into an amazingly good parody of Larry's own
drawling voice. "Just put it on my tab, Dewey. Keep 'em full."

  Larry looked at Wayne with dawning horror. He did remember a small, wiry guy with a peculiar haircut, a whiffle cut they had called it ten or fifteen years ago, a small guy with a whiffle haircut and a T-shirt reading JESUS IS COMING & IS HE PISSED. This guy seemed to have good dope practically falling out of his asshole. He could even remember telling this guy, Dewey the Deck, to keep his hospitality bowls full and put it on his tab. But that had been ... well, that had been days ago.

  Wayne said, "You're the best thing to happen to Dewey Deck in a long time, man."

  "How much is he into me for?"

  "Not bad on pot. Pot's cheap. Twelve hundred. Eight grand on coke."

  For a minute Larry thought he was going to puke. He goggled silently at Wayne. He tried to speak and he could only mouth: Ninety-two hundred?

  "Inflation, man," Wayne said. "You want the rest?"

  Larry didn't want the rest, but he nodded.

  "There was a color TV upstairs. Someone ran a chair through it. I'd guess three hundred for repairs. The wood paneling downstairs has been gouged to hell. Four hundred. With luck. The picture window facing the beach got broken the day before yesterday. Three hundred. The shag rug in the living room is totally kaput--cigarette burns, beer, whiskey. Four hundred. I called the liquor store and they're just as happy with their tab as the Deck is with his. Six hundred."

  "Six hundred for booze?" Larry whispered. Blue horror had encased him up to the neck.

  "Be thankful most of them have been scoffing beer and wine. You've got a four-hundred-dollar tab down at the market, mostly for pizza, chips, tacos, all that good shit. But the worst is the noise. Pretty soon the cops are going to land. Les flics. Disturbing the peace. And you've got four or five heavies doing up on heroin. There's three or four ounces of Mexican brown in the place."