Grave Refrain: A Love/Ghost Story (2 page)

The club had cleared out; only the bartender and a few waitresses remained. Andrew hadn’t realized he’d been staring at one of them until she tilted her head in invitation. Immediately his gaze shot to the floor, an embarrassing blush heating his face. Ridiculous, he knew, given his stellar performance, not to mention his age. All he would have to do was smile in return; she would approach, he would crack a few jokes, and good night to all. Except he was too restless for sex, too restless to concentrate on pleasing someone. What he wanted was a cigarette, but he reminded himself he had quit, or tried to, or had at least hidden them in the glove box of the truck.
Christ.
Why wasn’t she here tonight? He swore she would be here tonight. And that too was ridiculous.

“Yeah, if they all could suck like that, man,” Christian crooned, his New Orleans’ patois ever the perfect counterpoint to Simon’s staccato Irish brogue. The beads on his dreadlocks clacked their approval, and he looked up at Andrew with a dazzling grin. “Though I got to say, that was a fine piece of music you played tonight. When did you write it?”

“That? That’s nothing.”

Andrew did not want to get into the details. They would only razz him, and he was too keyed up from coming off the high of performing for such an appreciative crowd. He needed sleep, yet he knew he wouldn’t get more than his usual four hours. Plus, he was wallowing in self-pity again. She was not here tonight. Why did he feel like she would be? Romantic tosh, he knew it was, all of it. He shook his head hoping to toss away the thought.

“You’re getting that look again, my friend,” said Simon. “We need to ditch the equipment and get you some fine—What’s the name of the place across the street?”

“The Rat Hole,” Andrew answered archly and slung his gig bag over his shoulder.

“Hmmm. Well then, some fine Rat Hole grub ’tis. Just bat those Byronic eyelashes of yours in the closest serving wench’s direction.”

“Will you let it lie, already? I do not have Byronic shit, understand?”

“He doth crap and the poets weep,” Simon intoned, his hand over his heart.

“Sod off.”

Simon took endless delight in quoting the most recent write-up the band had received. It had appeared in the local newspaper a few weeks earlier, and the writer, who could not control being twenty, pert, and blond, evidently could not control her painful vocabulary either and opted to gush nauseatingly about the band, Andrew in particular.
A coiled spring of Byronic sex
, was the most ghastly of the epithets she had burdened him with. But the gibe stuck.

“Come on, Paulie boy. I’m going to gnaw Christian’s arm off if I don’t get some food soon, so let’s be off.”

“If you stopped wearing those hideous glasses, you could be Paul instead.”

“I’ll never be Paul. No need.”

Simon pushed his glasses up his long, thin nose with a pronounced shove of his middle finger, exactly as he had when Andrew had met him in their first year at school. He’d been a boy, all skin and bones, a veritable eleven-year-old Iggy Pop, wearing those same wire-rimmed, round glasses and a Chairman Mao jacket, forever searching for a fight or a rehearsal room.

The Rat Hole proved to be a postage stamp-sized restaurant that, from the chalkboard menu and the sticky Naugahyde booths, seemed to specialize in grease. A waitress stalked over to their table wearing an untied apron and a closing-time scowl. The few patrons remaining, pale and hunkered down over their drinks, appeared too intimidated by her to ask for another as she passed, but the moment she laid eyes on Andrew, Simon, and Christian, her pen and her smile clicked to attention.

Simon peered over his glasses at her waxy fuchsia lips. “What’s your name, love?”

“Gloria.”

He carefully spelled out her name as though gaining enlightenment. Before anyone knew what was happening, a grin burst across his face and he began to wail the chorus of the iconic song, causing the stricken waitress to drop her pad with a cry. Confusion reigned as Simon kept on, pausing only to order, while the other customers around them hunkered down further in their seats.

“Hit me,” Christian shouted to Andrew over the din.

“You or him?”

“Him, actually, but hit me with it.”

“‘Gloria’ by Van the Man, with his band at the time, Them. Recorded it in sixty-four on the B-side of ‘Baby, Please Don’t Go.’ And Shadows of Knight released it in sixty-five and got it all the way to number ten.”

“Covers?”

“Covered by every damn man alive, although I’m digging Simon’s take on it. It’s almost religious—makes you wish for death.”

It was their thing. Christian or Simon would name an obscure lyric and see if Andrew could place it. He could—always—as well as the original recording and any subsequent covers. It drove them insane.

A few minutes later, the waitress returned and crammed a pyramid-like pile of burgers, onion rings, and pints of Guinness around them before swiftly departing.

“I’ve been in touch with some people in Amsterdam,” Andrew announced midway through the meal, gauging his band mates’ reaction on whether they paused in their gorging or not. “We can line up a decent string of gigs there after we finish our rounds here, then start up in Prague again before Berlin.”

Simon swallowed hard in response, but his protests were interrupted when the door of the restaurant opened and a tall gentleman entered. Andrew hadn’t fully appreciated the true squalor of the restaurant until it served as the backdrop for the man’s Savile Row coat. Together with his tailored clothes and silk tie, Andrew reckoned his outfit probably cost more than their van
and
their equipment
and
their last two nights’ draws, all combined. As the man approached, the anemic overhead lights accented the highlights in his dark-blond hair and the laugh lines near the edges of his eyes that had left white quotation marks against his tanned skin.

“Cleaned favored and imperially slim,” Andrew whispered to himself, quoting
Richard Cory
. It was the curse of his
almost
poetry major to see everything in stanzas, second only in uselessness to his
almost
music major. The man must either have been lost or needed to take a piss.

“Andrew Hayes?”

The fact that he knew Andrew’s name didn’t bode well. Andrew stood and extended his hand; good manners had been drilled into him since he had been old enough to slouch, and he reasoned whatever was coming, it would be better to just get it over with.

“The same,” said Andrew cautiously.

The man removed his glove and offered his hand, his grip hard and immediate, like a polite arm wrestle. “May I?” He nodded to the booth where Simon and Christian sat.

“If we owe anything, we can’t pay it. At least not until the last check clears. But we’re good for it, or at least he is,” Simon stated, pointing his finger at Andrew.

The man smiled and took a seat before motioning to the bartender to replenish the empty glasses on the table. Curious silence held them together, as though they were watching each other through a zoo enclosure. Andrew especially felt the man’s scrutiny. Had they damaged something at the club? Was he some girl’s father? Was he a dealer? He knew Simon had been clean for years, so he couldn’t be a dealer.
Christ, please let him not be a dealer.

The tension finally got the better of Simon, and he asked, “And you would be?”

“Neil St. John.”

Andrew fell into his seat, not realizing he was still standing. His mind shot into overdrive. The name…he knew the name, but from where? Images flooded his consciousness first, as they always did, and then came the torrent of words and sounds: his favorite band, a television reporter, a face responding to questions.
How do you account for The Fractures’ meteoric rise to success, when a few short months ago they were playing dive bars?
Then the screen cut to a face that held a curt smile and feigned interest.
They needed the proper help
. The caption read Neil St. John.
The
Neil St. John. But he had retired after helping to produce The Compositions’ last album and was currently living in—oh, where the hell was it…San Francisco.

No, it couldn’t be
, Andrew thought.
Bloody Christ.
Evidently, Simon and Christian hadn’t put two and two together yet, or weren’t nearly as fazed as Andrew was by the fact that one of the world’s greatest managers now sat a few feet away from them.

Perhaps that was for the best. The last thing Andrew wanted was for them to appear desperate, and Christian would never be able to control his excitement if he knew who this man truly was. Being in a band had never lost its initial thrill for him despite the sleepless nights, the rotten food, and the endless headaches. Getting someone like Neil St. John to back them would be huge. Beyond huge. Andrew felt his mouth go dry and his ADD make its way out of his hands as they began to play the underside of the table, fast and faster until he forced them flat in his lap.

“I was impressed by what I heard tonight. It’s raw and needs work, a lot of work actually, but it’s got something, something that could be incredible if you do the right things. You recorded an album. On what label?”

Andrew blinked, and his mind raced to comprehend the situation before him. “We don’t have one. It’s self-financed.” He was not sure this was what Neil wanted to hear, yet the man’s face gave nothing away. Christ, he had to stop his hands from shaking. Neil St. John.
The
Neil St. John.

“No manager, no agent?”

“Nothing.”

“How do you do it?”

“Well…” Andrew took a deep breath. How did they do it? In the beginning, they had hired one Mr. Lou Fratteni, a squat, paunchy chartered-accountant type from Liverpool who claimed he knew the business inside and out. He ended up disappearing one night with most of their money and Andrew’s best Cherryburst Les Paul. After that, they swore off the idea, deciding to manage the band on their own. It worked, or had worked for a while. Andrew knew they couldn’t go on like this forever though; they needed help. It was too much—too much work, too much tension, too much everything.

“We manage pretty well. We exploit every form of social media we can get our hands on, and we’re obsessively fan driven. Arrange our shows where we can gather the most bodies. Like tonight, we knew a ton of our fans would show up if we could book that particular site. See, we can usually fill up houses that way, that and by word-of-mouth. There isn’t much left over for marketing—a little radio, flyers, and whatever the venue is willing to front.” Andrew wanted to sound intelligent or at least intelligible, but his excitement left him rocking back and forth like his seat was on fire.

“We’re the rock geek darlings of the Internet,” Simon added, peering briefly over his glasses at his band mate. “We give our knickers away for free online, let ’em listen to our music, get them hooked, but make them pay at the door to hear it live.” His hand curled around the handle of his glass, the letters I-R-O-N tattooed on the back of his fingers. Simon wiggled his pinky, emblazoned with a Y
.

Over the next Guinness, Andrew could feel the anticipation hum around them much like the bristling nervous edge of walking onstage. It was apparent that Neil was interested; he seemed full of questions and noted their answers in errant scribbles on the paper placemats. How interested, who knew, but the communal sense of unease of a few minutes ago had given way to fast conversation, people talking over people, and in the back of Andrew’s mind the future was quickly being reduced to this booth on Saturday, December 27, 2009. Their first conversation, the anthologies would say. He could see the article in
Spin,
with a black and white picture of the four of them leaning against the tattered booth.

“Wait, you’ve been touring for how long?” Neil asked, bringing Andrew back down to earth.

“Two straight years with no breaks,” Christian answered, a hint of pride mingled with disbelief in his tone. “Unless you account for the time we took to record the album and the two weeks off for Christmas so my parents could scream at me for squandering my Cambridge scholarship. I told them I just couldn’t get enough of living in a van with Euro-trash degenerates and using travel-sized mini-soaps.”

Neil laughed out loud at that, which allowed the rest of them to join along.

“Christian was playing jazz downtown when we saved him from wasting his fine talents on decent pay,” Simon interrupted, wanting to set the record straight. “We had left university and thought it would be a healthy career choice for him as well.”

“Proving that slavery never died,” added Christian.

“And you two? How did you meet?” Neil looked between Andrew and Simon.

“Go ahead,” Simon offered with a wave of his glass, R-O-N-Y stretching wide. It was a story they had recited countless times, never tiring in the retelling, as it always gave them the opportunity to get a rise out of the other. “I’ll correct it anyway. You always fuck it up, trying to make yourself look superior with that Byronic sex appeal.”