T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

He was trying to remember what he’d heard about her — somebody had knocked her up and she’d had a back-room abortion and there’d been complications. Or no, that wasn’t her, that was the girl who’d made a big splash two years back with that novelty record, the blonde, what was her name? Then it came to him, a picture he’d been holding awhile, a night at a party somewhere and him walking in to get his coat and she was doing two guys at once, Darlene, Darlene Delmar. “Yeah,” he said, “yeah, that’d be swell, L.A.’s the place, I mean palm trees, the ocean…”

She didn’t answer. She’d cupped her hands to light the cigarette — which he should have lit for her, but it was nothing to him. He stood rooted to the spot, his overcoat dripping, and his eyes drifted to the murky window set in the door — there was movement there, out on the street, a tube of yellow extending suddenly to the curb. Two guys with violin cases were sliding out of a cab, sleet fastening on their shoulders and hats like confetti. He looked back to her and saw that she was staring at him over the cigarette. “Well, here come the strings,” he said, unfolding an arm to usher her up the hall. “I guess we may as well get to it.”

—

He hadn’t bothered to light her cigarette for her — hadn’t even moved a muscle for that matter, as if he were from someplace like Outer Mongolia where they’d never heard of women or cigarettes or just plain common courtesy. Or manners either. His mother must have been something, a fat fishwife with a mustache, and probably shoeless and illiterate on top of it. Johnny Bandon, born in Flatbush as Giancarlo Abandonado. One more wop singer: Sinatra, Como, Bennett, Bandon. She couldn’t believe she’d actually thought he had talent when she was growing up, all those hours listening alone to the sweet tenor corroboration of his voice and studying his picture in the magazines until her mother came home from the diner and told her to go practice her scales. She’d known she was working with him today, that much her manager had told her, but when she’d come through the door, chilled right to the marrow, she’d barely recognized him. Rumor had it he’d been popping pills, and she knew the kind of toll that took on you — knew firsthand — but she hadn’t been prepared for the way the flesh had fallen away from his face or the faraway glare of his eyes. She’d always remembered him as handsome — in a greasy sort of way — but now here he was with his cueball eyes and the hair ruffled like a duck’s tail feathers on the back of his head, gesturing at her as if he thought he was the A&R man or something. Or some potentate, some potentate from Siam.

Up the hall and into the studio, a pile of coats, hats and scarves in the secretary’s office, no place to sit or even turn around and the two fiddle players right on their heels, and she was thinking one more job and let’s get it over with. She’d wanted to be pleasant, wanted to make the most of the opportunity — enjoy herself, and what was wrong with that? — but the little encounter in the hallway had soured her instantly, as if the pain in her backside and the weather and her bloodshot eye wasn’t enough. She unwound the scarf and shrugged out of her coat, looking for a place to lay it where it wouldn’t get sat on.

Harvey Neff — this was his studio and he was producing — emerged from the control booth to greet them. He was a gentleman, a real gentleman, because he came up to her first and took her hand and kissed her cheek and told her how terrific it was to be working with her again before he even looked at Johnny. Then he and Johnny embraced and exchanged a few backslaps and the usual words of greeting— Hey, man, long time no see and How’s it been keeping? and Cool, man, cool —while she patted down her hair and smoothed her skirt and debated removing the dark glasses.

“Listen, kids,” Harvey was saying, turning to her now, “I hope you’re up for this, because as I say we are going to do this and do it right, one session, and I don’t care how long it takes, nobody leaves till we’re all satisfied, right? Because this is a Christmas record and we’ve got to get it out there, I mean, immediately or there’s no sense in making it at all, you know what I mean?”

She said she did, but Johnny just stared — was he going to be all right for this? — until Fred Silver, the A&R man for Bluebird, came hurtling into the room with his hands held out before him in greeting and seconded everything Harvey had said, though he hadn’t heard a word of it. “Johnny,” he said, ignoring her, “just think if we can get this thing out there and get some airplay, because then it slips into the repertoire and from Thanksgiving to New Year’s every year down the road it’s there making gravy for everybody, right? I mean look at ‘White Christmas.’ ‘Santa, Baby.’ Or what was that other thing, that Burl Ives thing?”

The room was stifling. She studied the side of Fred Silver’s head — bald to the ears, the skin splotched and sweating — and was glad for the dress she was wearing. But Johnny — maybe he was just a little lit, maybe that was it — came to life then, at least long enough to shrug his shoulders and give them all a deadpan look, as if to say I’m so far above this you’d better get down on your knees right now and start chanting hosannas. What he did say, after a beat, was: “Yeah, that I can dig, but really, Fred, I mean really—‘Little Suzy Snowflake’?”

—

They walked through it twice and he thought he was going to die from boredom, the session men capable enough — he knew most of them — and the girl singer hitting the notes in a sweet, commodious way, but he was for a single take and then out for a couple drinks and a steak and some life, for Christ’s sake. He tried to remind himself that everybody did novelty records, Christmas stuff especially, and that he should be happy for the work — hell, Nat King Cole did it, Sinatra, Martin, all of them — but about midway through the arrangement he had to set down the sheet music and go find the can just to keep from exploding. Little Suzy Snowflake. It was stupid. Idiotic. Demeaning. And if he’d ever had a reputation as a singer — and he had, he did — then this was the kiss of death.

There were four walls in the can, a ceiling and a floor. He locked the door behind him, slapped some water on his face and tried to look at himself long enough in the mirror to smooth his hair down — and what he wouldn’t have given to have been blessed with hair that would just stay in place for ten minutes instead of this kinky, nappy mess he was forever trying to paste to the side of his head. Christ, he hated himself. Hated the look in his eyes and the sunken cheeks and the white-hot fire of ambition that drove him, that had driven him, to this, to make this drivel and call it art. He was shit, that was what he was. He was washed up. He was through.

Without thinking twice he pulled the slim tube of a reefer from the pack of Old Golds in his jacket pocket and lit up, right there in the can, and he wouldn’t have been the first to do it, God knew. He took a deep drag and let the smoke massage his lungs, and he felt the pall lift. Another drag, a glance up at the ceiling and a single roach there, making its feelers twitch. He blew smoke at it—“Get your kicks, Mr. Bug,” he said aloud, “because there’s precious few of them in this life”—and then, without realizing just when he’d slipped into it, he found he was humming a Cab Calloway tune, biggest joke in the world, “Reefer Man.”

—

She must have looked like the maternal type — maybe it was the dress, or more specifically, the way it showed off her breasts — because Harvey prevailed upon her to go down the hall to the restroom and mother the star of the proceedings a little bit because the ticker was ticking and everybody, frankly, was starting to get a little hot under the collar, if she knew what he meant. “Like pissed off? Like royally?” Darlene took a moment, lowered her head and peeped over the sunglasses to let her eyes rove over the room. “Poor man,” she said in her sweetest little-girl-lost voice, “he seemed a bit confused — maybe he can’t find his zipper.” Everybody — she knew them all, except the strings — burst out in unison, and they should have recorded that. George Withers, the trombonist, laughed so hard he dropped his mouthpiece on the floor with a thud that sounded like a gunshot, and that got them all laughing even harder.