Sweeter Life (6 page)

It happened around the time of the winter solstice, as so many epiphanies do. Ronnie and a few of the more serious students in his college had walked across the Isis to the Fife and Drum, having just handed in their final essays before Christmas break. The idea was to treat themselves to a pint and a steak-and-kidney pie, and to say farewell until the new year. But one pint became two, and as Ronnie neared the bottom of his third ale, Colin McDermid put a coin in the jukebox. Minor chords swelled to fill the room. A brooding, sultry beat, a twangy American voice:

A pop tune like something you might get from Gene Pitney or Bobby Rydell. Catchy, in a mindless sort of way, and Ronnie at first was only half-listening. Then, after the second plaintive chorus, the room was filled with a sound as stirring as Gabriel’s trumpet, only it wasn’t any kind of instrument Ronnie had ever heard, or any kind of musicianship he could understand. In fact, it was so otherworldly, so large and joyful and confusing, that the minute the solo ended he couldn’t remember a single note of it, couldn’t think of a way to even describe it to himself or name the effect it had had on him.

He handed Colin another coin. “Play it again,” he demanded.

The song, he discovered, was called “Don’t Look Back,” by a singer named Gil Gannon. On second listening, the lyrics and melody seemed inane, simple sentiments given an anxious treatment. Ronnie was about to turn away from the jukebox disheartened, as though the whole thing had been a momentary aberration, but then the solo started and he stood transfixed, struggling to understand just what it was he was hearing. A keyboard of some sort, he was certain, but no keyboard he had ever heard before, and played in a fashion that was unfamiliar to him. Nothing like the church music he had heard all his life. And when the solo ended, his sense of it evaporated completely.

He put another coin in the machine and chose the song again. This time he returned to the table and had everyone pay attention. After the solo had sounded a third time, he looked at his friends and said, “What is that? What am I listening to?”

They laughed as though it was the alcohol talking. “Top 40,” Colin mocked. “Nothing to get fussed about. You want to try Brubeck sometime.”

“But did you ever hear the likes of it?” Ronnie persisted, waiting for one of the others to agree with him. “The shapes, I mean. It’s almost frightening, isn’t it?”

“Give it up, Conger, you’re pickled.”

“I’m not … I’m stunned. I didn’t know, not really. This is brilliant. It’s magic.”

No one else could hear it; and the more he proclaimed the solo’s special virtues, the more they laughed. “No more ale for Conger,” they hooted. And when he got up to play the song a fourth time, they threatened him with violence, so he bid them farewell and went back to his room to contemplate his newfound knowledge.

Next morning, Ronnie, who until that weekend had shown no special affinity for music, who in fact had tuned it out whenever possible in favour of philosophy and football, bought himself a record player and a copy of “Don’t Look Back,” which he played twenty or thirty times without stopping. And still he could find no path into the heart of the mystery.

He memorized the rhythms, gave the solo a phonetic structure that allowed him to scat along with the record, and then, better still, to himself as he walked along the street.

The next afternoon, with snowflakes drifting softly around him, he walked down High Street to do a bit of Christmas shopping. And that’s when it occurred to him that if one song on the pub’s jukebox held this kind of transcendent magic, then surely others might as well, that “Don’t Look Back” and its deliciously maddening solo might be but a pale intimation of the greater wonders that awaited. It was this possibility that made him take his train fare, and the money he had set aside for presents, and spend it all on singles and LPs: pop, gospel, country and western, rhythm and blues,
jazz. He called his father that night to explain that he had decided to remain in Oxford for the holidays—to study.

From that point on he was a goner. Six weeks into the new semester he had sold all his books, liquidated his assets, cleaned out his bank account (most of which was owed to the university), and taken the train to London, where he found himself a small flat near Ladbroke Grove. It was 1963.

For the better part of a year he bounced through a series of low-paying jobs—stacking shelves at record stores, clearing tables at clubs, anything that would put him in touch with music and the people who loved it, people who could stand around for hours and testify to the majesty of Lonnie Donegan and Doc Watson, Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday, Elvis and Big Bill Broonzy and, of course, Jimmy Waters, whose brilliant solo had made “Don’t Look Back” a heavenly thing. More often than not, Ronnie’s new friends were just like him, with no musical training, no ear, people who had been caught unaware by the ineffable delights of music and had none of the tools required to make sense of it. Words failed them. Hand gestures failed them. In the end they could only say, “Listen, listen,” knowing that as often as not the truth would fall upon deaf ears.

Ronnie wasn’t stupid. He saw that he had exchanged one religion for another, that he and the others, the testifiers, approached their subject with a kind of evangelical zeal. Yet in contrast to his father’s religion, which seemed cold and commercial, with its tit for tat, its various exchange rates for salvation, music, or that evanescent glory he had discovered inside of music, was a pure and purifying thrill.

That second summer in London, the manic fever of Beatlemania beginning to spill across the globe, he travelled north to attend his brother Kenny’s wedding in Glasgow. Ronnie now had sharp clothes and long hair, and his father could not bring himself to look at him, which promised to make the occasion as dark and dour as the black brooding stone of the city. But on the day before his brother’s wedding, as Ronnie was standing in the pub near Kenny’s flat and agonizing over the speech he was expected to give as best man, he felt a massive paw clamp down on his shoulder. “Eh, yew. Gie-us an eighty, will ye? Me throat’s a wee bit dry.”

Ronnie wheeled around and laughed. “If it isn’t Tommy Mac …”

“Aye, mate, still kickin’. And lookatcha, ya fuckin’ tossel. I dinna reconize ya with a pint in yer hand. Naughty boy. Dinna falla yer old man there, didjiz.”

Tommy Mac, even at the age of twelve, had been more man than boy, with thick wrists and fingers, a massive neck and chest, short stumpy legs and a forehead like an anvil, hard and flat and punishing. Ronnie had seen several noses broken by that forehead and, although he well knew the higher standards expected of him as a minister’s son, had managed to spend time each summer in Tom’s boisterous company. When Tom left home at the age of sixteen, lured into the darker side of Glasgow with Alec Walker and his gang of thugs, Ronnie grieved like a brother.

The afternoon of their reunion they worked through several pints, calling up old haunts, old faces. And the more they talked, the more they discovered it was not just the past they had in common. They were also reunited by a love of soul music. (“Aye, Ronnie, it’s trew, the Scots are the nignogs a Europe. Lift tha’ barge. Tote tha’ fuckin’ bale.”)

After their fifth pint they hatched a plan: they would rent the banquet hall of the East Kilbride Benevolent Society and put on a concert. Ronnie would handle all the paperwork and the promotion. Tom and a few of his mates would provide the heavy lifting and security. From there it was concerts in Glasgow and Edinburgh. A year went by in a blink, with the two making more money than they had ever made before. Then Bobby Mason, the manager of Scot Free, approached Ronnie with a proposition.

“We’re off to America,” Bobby said. “Crazy about us over there, it seems. Dates from coast to coast. Disneyland,
American Bandstand
. We could use a road manager with your kind of smarts, mate. A fixer.”

Ronnie agreed on the spot. It put an end to the successful operation he and Tom had going, but that was a small price to pay for a pilgrimage to the holy sites of one’s belief—New York, New Orleans, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Los Angeles. When Scot Free returned to Glasgow at the end of the tour, Ronnie stayed behind to live the dream. Working out of New York, he hitched up with other tours and made a name for himself.

But late in the winter of 1968, on the road in Western Canada with Aaron Maxx, the dream began to unravel. The tour had been a fiasco, as Ronnie had predicted it would be when Aaron insisted on using the
Belko Brothers, a pair of local promoters who normally booked wrestling extravaganzas in mid-size cowtowns. They ran ads on the wrong radio stations, put posters in the wrong places, greased the palms of the wrong people. Worst of all, they booked Aaron into towns so far apart, in the dead of winter, that it was physically impossible to make it to the gigs on time, even if the crew packed up right after a show and drove all night.

Two concerts had already been cancelled, and in Staghorn, Alberta, after driving through a blizzard, they arrived at the arena at eleven at night, three hours after showtime and a good hour and a half after the last person had claimed a refund. The hall was dark, the parking lot empty save for a black Mercedes idling by the side door. Inside the car were the Belkos, large men with large voices. When they spoke, only their heads were visible through the open window. In the clearest possible terms they indicated that this was their last warning: one more screw-up and they would sue Aaron and impound the bus and gear. For emphasis, their bodyguard, an ex-wrestler by the name of Bull Bodine, swaggered around the parking lot in a menacing fashion.

Aaron, looking ridiculous in velvet pants and a white fur coat, pointed his finger at Ronnie and said, “I knew we should have used an American tour manager. This never would have happened with someone who knew about these things.”

Something inside Ronnie snapped. It didn’t matter that the Belkos and all the crew and all the musicians were watching. He grabbed Aaron by his furry lapels and slammed him against the side of the bus, which was covered with oil and slush. And when Ronnie had him lined up for a massive head butt, a Mackie special, he just backed away, dusted off his hands and walked toward town. It was time for a change.

He spent three nights in Staghorn, in a seedy little room at the Queen’s Hotel, wondering how to get back to New York. He had no suitcase, no coat and less than a hundred dollars in his wallet. But those concerns would soon fade to nothing. He was on the verge of his fateful meeting with Jimmy Waters, which now, almost three years later, had led to another fleabag room in the middle of nowhere, this time with a dead body in his trunk.

He got to his feet and walked to the window, gazing out at the parking lot. No other cars in sight. No traffic on the road. Even so, he hoped
to God that Cal didn’t start to reek before nightfall. And with that sour thought, he tried to sleep.

At sunset, he drove three miles to the nearest town and bought himself several small tins of evaporated milk. He called Adrian from a pay phone and asked how everything was going.

“Fine, Arsey. Tickety-boo. The drive to Campenola was a bit of a lark, you know. It’s not often we have a full day off.”

“About Cal, Ade. How are the lads taking it?”

“Relieved, I’d say, that poor Cal has moved on—though I’m sure they might feel different if they knew exactly where he had moved on to.” He laughed at his own witticism, and Ronnie could hear Kerry’s harsh cackle in the background. Like a couple of old hens, he thought.

“Of course,” Adrian continued, “Sonny’s been in a right ugly mood all day. Thinks we should cancel tomorrow’s show. But he’ll be all right. How’s everything there, Arsey?”

“Fine. I plan to be in Campenola before showtime, with or without a bass player. How’s Jim taking it?”

“Touch and go there for a while. Got tears in his eyes like he’d lost his best mate. But I made him a pot of tea and asked Eura to look in on him. When she left his trailer, she said he was sleeping like a baby.”

“Good man, Ade. See you tomorrow.”

By the time Ronnie returned to the motel, it was dark, so he took the opportunity to open his trunk and grab Cal’s suitcase. In the room, he went through the boy’s belongings one more time and found nothing that could tie the corpse to Jim. There was no driver’s licence or birth certificate, no identification at all. The only personal item in Cal’s wallet was a high school photo. Nor would there be any record of him with Customs and Immigration, even though they had crossed into Canada several weeks ago. The border guard had smiled kindly when he saw the name on the side of the bus—The Jimmy Waters Revival—and when Ronnie showed him their itinerary, playing to church groups across Ontario, the guard just waved them into the country without a second thought.

Satisfied that everything was in order, Ronnie hauled the luggage out to the car and did a final sniff check. Two hours later, a pale moon on the
horizon, he set off in search of a likely spot for Cal’s resting place. Around eleven o’clock he found the perfect location. There wasn’t a house in sight. Just in case, he pulled to the side of the road and sat there for ten minutes with the lights off, nursing a can of Carnation. Not a soul passed by.

Finally, his features scrunched with distaste, he dragged Cal’s body out of the trunk and along a narrow path that led to a small shack. On the door of the building was a sign, “Pump Station #1.” Ronnie propped the body against the rear of the shack, facing away from the road, and returned to the car for Cal’s belongings, which he set around the body just as Cal might have arranged them. Then he carried the towel and the bedspread back to the car and sat behind the wheel, shivering. After a few bleak moments he started driving slowly past wide black fields, weedy ditches and the occasional dwelling. The road then climbed a steep ridge, and as he approached a more settled area, with farms on either side of him, he began to feel even more nervous. If people spotted his Caddy, they might tie the two things together when they discovered Cal.