Sean Beaudoin - Welcome Thieves

After a discussion of John Lee Hooker’s mad chops, Tumast nods, says, “You pretty cool for — ”

“A white dude?”

“Was gonna say nineteen.”

They both laugh.

The phone keeps ringing. Tumast takes off his shirt and pulls yards of Saran Wrap around his waist, says the sweat helps “tighten his shit up.” Nikki learns how to play a high C scale, pictures the neighbors as they wince over their frozen dinners, eye their tortured dogs.

Sometimes Tumast scratches at his dandruffy Afro, nods off midsentence.

Nikki figures it’s just been a long day.

CLASSES. THAT DRUNK PROFESSOR. Behind the bleachers while football. The library and everything in it not read. Nikki and a little thing named Chelsea, expensive sweaters and wine-dark skin, crashing through cornfields in her dad’s Miata. Late nights with cough syrup and candles and Nick Cave, “It’s so cool you have the same name,” her wide hips and cheap panties, making eggs while she sleeps it off.

He tries out for a few bands, this one too strummy, that one too singer-songwritery. Then a thrash outfit with inverted crosses and eye makeup, afterward the lead screamer going, “Hey, you’re not half-bad.”

But the dude reminds him too much of Duff.

There is some spoken word.

Someone’s half-finished film.

A short story stolen almost entirely from Ray Carver.

Calling Raymond Carver “Ray.”

A keg and that guy down the hall who spreads his Kawasaki 750 out on the carpet twice a week.

Fall, winter, spring. Fall again.

That year there was always some prick with a didgeridoo.

DUFF ROLLS INTO TOWN unannounced, three blankets and an ’88 LeBaron, moves into the low-slung apartments just off campus everyone calls Crackland. Claims he’s signed up for classes but unless there’s a master’s program in eyeballing eighths, or a PhD in convincing waitresses not to sweat the condom, Nikki doubts it. They jam, Duff slash-fingered and manic, lots of great ideas for liner notes and string arrangements, lots of back slaps and a considered misreading of the circle of fifths.

There are some tantrums.

Duff gets angry when he can’t get his amp to “make that crunchy sound like last time.” At a party with barrel fires outside he makes a cross with duct tape and two sticks to protest church or some shit, tosses it in, realizes too late he’s burning a cross. The Third World Alliance is not pleased. There is an investigation. There is a dark hallway ass-kicking. Duff refuses to shower for three weeks in lieu of filing a written complaint. He calls it a Worker’s Action. He says Eugene V. Debs did not wear Ban roll-on. Nikki’s friends start calling Duff names like “Smelldolf Hitler” and “Smell Gibson” and “Smells Like Teen Suicide.”

But not to his face.

When he finally reunites with soap, there’s talk of a duo.

They pull six songs together, try to think of a name.

Nikki likes Pure Candy.

Duff likes the Four Tercels.

Pure Tercel plays two shows, the second in the basement of a basement, where Duff meets a girl called Agnes. She has a tattoo of a shotgun wound and a birthmark shaped like the Amalfi Coast. Agnes takes Duff by the hand, wants to show him something out back before the next set.

They disappear for the winter.

That spring Nikki graduates with a degree in pulling the graveyard shift at a motel beneath an exit ramp. There’s an actual bell on the counter that dings. Once in a while they get a frugal tourist, otherwise it’s mainly battered moms and pregnant runaways, plus a guy named Winslow who buys a large black drip and a dozen donuts every morning, sits with his feet dangling over the empty pool. Winslow chuckles, takes a bite, says he’s “Killing Myself Fatly with This Song” when anyone asks, which no one does, so he tells whoever walks by, which just makes them walk faster.

There’s a cassette deck by the cash box. Nikki plays John Coltrane all shift long, thinks “Alabama” is the saddest melody he’s ever heard, plays it over and over louder and louder until dawn, the more trebly and dissonant the better.

Each note a shard of inalterable beauty.

Each note like bug spray for the insane.

THE FAMILY IN 227 never comes back. Nikki gets sent over with gloves and a mop. There’s trash everywhere — socks, empties, a bear with all the stuffing hugged out of its neck.

Leaned up against the mini fridge is an old acoustic.

Covered with finger grime and Dead stickers.

It screams hippie chicks with thrift skirts and anklets. It begs for braless fatties to kick off their sandals and spin in the wet grass.

“Anything good?” the manager asks.

“Nope,” Nikki says, then rumbles through half a dozen Neil Young in front of the campus Quiznos twice a week. There is a hat. The professor with the too-neat beard drops a twenty and winks. The kind of girls who hang out and listen hang out and listen. The kind of girls who smoke sigh and kill off another Marlboro red.

On a random Tuesday Duff is there, at the edge of the crowd.

Nodding along, or pretending to.

They get beers.

“Where’s Agnes?”

“Let the door hit her where the good lord split her.”

“She dump you?”

He grins, down a tooth or two. “Yeah, pretty much.”

There are some hugs.

Within a week Duff starts a band with a dude named King Ink. They need a bass player. Duff says, “No sweat, I’ll vouch for your candy ass.”

King Ink calls at midnight, asks Nikki does he want to join.

“You got a name yet?”

“Scrofula,” King Ink says.

There’s a long pause.

“It’s a disease with glandular swellings. Most likely a cousin of tuberculosis.”

There’s a long pause.

“Listen, you in or not?”

“You haven’t heard me play.”

“Duff is an astute judge of character.”

“That,” Nikki says, “is without question the least true thing anyone has ever said aloud.”

King Ink insists Scrofula will be the Guns N’ Roses of the greater Ohio Valley area. By the second practice it’s clear they will never be the Guns N’ Roses of the greater Ohio Valley area. King Ink is six-foot-six, wears velvet boots, and has the goatee Rosemary’s baby would have grown his freshman year at Sarah Lawrence. Duff says not to worry, the dude is a genius. Besides, once they buy a sampler they’ll be playing thousand-seat venues.

Scrofula does six shows, opens two nights for Particle Bored.

And blows them off the stage.

Duff says there’s strong label interest. Smoking Goat out of Chicago. Reeves Rimini wants to produce. Duff says King Ink says everyone needs to put up three hundred to cut a demo. Scrofula rehearses the shit out of their setlist, hones it to a tight forty minutes with a killer payoff, a tune Nikki wrote called “Those Chelsea Mournings.” After practice they crack beers, load all the gear into the van for the trip to the studio. King Ink takes them each by the shoulders, insists they’re on the verge of something.

“Special? No, big. Big? No, huge.”

Nikki gets chills down his arms. King Ink orders three large pies to celebrate, splurges on extra pepperoni, takes the van to go pick them up.

And never comes back.

NIKKI DOESN’T TOUCH a guitar for a year, then one day spots a ’73 Tele Thinline hanging in a pawnshop, and can’t buy it fast enough. The thing so clean it sings. So dirty it’s a slut. It takes months to learn that Chet Atkins lick, let alone the James Burton. He writes a dozen new songs, thinks about maybe being frontman for once, get some kids just want to learn their parts, keep their mouths shut.

Memorial Day comes and Nikki agrees to a weekend roadie with day shift clerks he barely knows. Robot, Marcellus, and Gay Don. They camp out one night, hit a titty bar the next, on the way back stop in Columbus to piss. It’s hot. Nikki’s Replacements T is wet to the shoulder blades. They’re at the edge of a campus, a football powerhouse. A strip of dives ten blocks long, beer-soaked carpet and specials in every window, JAEGER TUESDAYS!