David Gates - Preston Falls

Reed's kneeling on the shag carpeting that covers the hilly floorboards, plugging cords into a couple of stomp boxes, a black Les Paul slung over his shoulder on a tooled-leather strap. He looks up and says, "Hey, here's the man."

"I think I found the right place," Willis says, and sportively sniffs the air. There's a drum set (a fat longhair is tightening a snare), a mixing board set up on a card table, two old-time capsule-shaped mikes on mike stands, two speaker horns on sturdy tripods, two scuffed-up floor monitors. For decor, campy LP covers pushpinned to a beam: Lawrence Welk with liftfed baton, Sgt. Barry Sadler, Jim Nabors, some goony-looking country singer even Willis doesn't recognize: This Is Tommy Collins. A rusty oil-drum stove resting on cinderblocks, with a salvaged piece of corrugated aluminum roofing underneath: the stovepipe sticks right out through a circular hole in the wood siding, without a baffle, or flange, whatever you call it.

"Gentlemen?" says Reed. "Doug Willis."

"Hey."

"Hey."

"Okay, we got Sparky" — leveling a finger at the fat-boy drummer— "and Dan" — finger moving to a tall, lanky guy in a plaid hunting cap with the earflaps down—"and Mitch" — to a short guy with bug-eye sunglasses and a red shirt, wearing a low-slung Strat that looks too big on him.

The little Strat guy nods at Willis's case. "So what have we here?"

"Tele," says Willis. "Nothing special. Early seventies."

"Cool," the little guy says. "Come on, early seventies? They hadn't gone to shit then. By any means."

"Yeah, me either," says Willis.

"You got that right," says the drummer. He cocks his head and hits the snare once with a drumstick. Shakes his head.

"So whip it out," says Reed.

"Yeah yeah, whip it out," says the little guy.

"You fuckin' guitar sharks," the drummer says. "Man just got here. Here, man — I forgot your name." He offers Willis a stubby brass pipe from an ashtray sitting on his floor tom.

"Oh right," says the one with the earflaps. "Get the fuckin' guy dusted, good idea. Everybody ain't a fuckin' animal like you, man, that they can play behind that shit." He picks up a Fender P-bass with most of the finish worn off.

"Fuck you, man," says the drummer. "Try to hoover up enough of that shit of yours to get off, man, I fuckin' choke to death."

"Gentlemen, gentlemen," says Reed.

"Why don't you plug in over there?" says the bass player. He points to a power strip that's plugged, in turn, into an orange cord snaking outdoors through a knothole.

"Here, I got some weed here that's just weed." Reed takes a half-smoked joint out of his shirt pocket.

Willis holds up a hand. "No, I'm good. I just had a bunch of coffee." He stopped smoking dope years ago: officially because it made it harder to stay off cigarettes, actually because it made people around him seem evil. These people already seem evil.

"Well, listen," says the bass player, taking his bass off again. "I'm a do a couple lines here and like whoever wants to join me."

"Ah hell," Reed says.

PRESTON FALLS

"Ho-yeah," says the little Strat guy. "Yeh-yeh-yeh." He puts his tongue out and pants like a dog, which is all Willis needs to cross him off.

"Twist my arm," says the drummer.

"Hey, twist my dick,'" says the bass player. "I thought you said you choke to death."

"Hey, I like to choke, man." General laughter. "Like those dudes that hang theirself to get a boner, you know?"

"Hmm," Willis says. "I guess a little of that never hurt anybody." Suddenly he feels like he has to shit: the excitement of being bad.

The bass player has taken the pushpins out of This Is Tommy Collins and set it on top of his amp. He pours white powder from a Band-Aid box onto Tommy Collins's sincere face, and hands the little guitar guy a box of plastic straws and a pair of orange-handled scissors. "Hey, anybody got anything with,some kinda edge?" he says. "Never mind, fuck it." He grabs a cassette, dumps out the tape and the paper insert — Stevie Ray Vaughn and Double Trouble — and uses the plastic box to chop and scrape and push the shit into a pair of parallel lines. The Httle guitar guy hands him a two-inch length of straw, and he bends down and hoovers them up. Then sinks to sit on the floor, snuffling and flogging his nose with his index finger, saying "Wowser."

Willis scrapes together a pair of lines half as long and half as wide, out of both good manners and caution. He snorts a line into each nostril; it stings his sinuses and begins dripping and burning down the back of his throat. Except that his heart's racing just a teeny bit — which is probably just psychological because he's all of, what, five seconds into this — he actually feels surprisingly great, though he does hope his heart won't start going any faster.

He watches the little Strat guy take his turn. Shit, these aren't bad people. He'd actually really like to get to know them. "So," he says, "you guys are all married?"

This gets a big laugh. Willis didn't realize what a really funny thing it was to say at this juncture, but he now feels privileged to have the secret key to cocaine humor: to be completely out there, yet at the same time right in there.

"Hey, Counselor," the little guy says, "you better step up to the plate. This shit is so fucking excellent, man. It's definitely Howdy Doody Time."

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"You're dating yourself," says Reed, straw poised above two ridges of powder,

"Fuck it," says the drummer. "I'm a fuckin' get ripped." He picks up his pipe and starts slapping at his shirt pockets with his other hand, right side, left side, right side.

"Like you ain't fuckin' ripped already." The bass player's back on his feet. "Here, this what you're after?" He hands the drummer a pink butane lighter.

"So we in tune here approximately?" says Reed. "Whew. Holy shit."

"Yeh-yeh-yeh, let's do it," says the little guy. "Break out that bad-ass Telecaster, man."

"Absolutely," says Willis. He opens his case, snap snap, and slings his guitar on. "Anybody got a tuner?"

Reed hisses and makes a vampire-repelling cross with his index fingers. "We're strictly organic here. Fuckin' goat cheese, whatever. Mitch, you're in with yourself, right? Whatta you got for an E?"

So they all stand there stoned as pigs, tuning for about eight hours. Twang twang. De de de de de. With the tuner this would take two seconds. But on the other hand it's great, like lights going down at the movies.

"Dan, you somewhere close?" Reed says.

"Fuck if 1 know." The bass player flips his amp off standby, twaddles strings with the first two fingers of his right hand, and big notes come booming out. "Somebody give me a fuckin' G?"

They all stroke G chords at him.

"Yeah, how about just one a you?" he says. The little guy plays a G chord and the bass player starts hitting harmonics and cranking at his tuning pegs, trying to get one howl up level with another howl. "Golden," he says, though it doesn't sound like he's improved things any. "So what are we doing?"

"Can you play Tar, Far Away'?" says Reed. "Rimshot — ^where's the rimshot?" He turns around to the drummer. "Ah fuck." The drummer's lying on the floor; he's taken the round seat cushion off its chrome-plated tripod to pillow his head.

"Hey, what about 'Walk This Way'?" says the little guy. "You do 'Walk This Way,' right?" He plays the riff at Wfllis.

"You know I actually never have?" says Willis. Aerosmith was always too thug for him. "I mean, I know the tune."

PRESTON FALLS

"You'll pick it right up. Starts off in E, man, then the verse goes to C, like yah dah DART! up from B flat, like." He plays it to demonstrate, yelling yah dah DAHT! as he moves the bar chord up the three frets.

"Right," says Willis. Normally this would be within his scope. "Play the hook again? The E part?"