The Wishbones (7 page)

“I guess I'm a bit rusty.”

She ignored the comment, frowning pointedly at the limp blanket. Dave grabbed the two corners on his end and they pulled it taut between them, flapping it up and down to clean it off. He thought about the ant with the bread crumb, all that hard work gone to waste.

“I just want a normal life,” she said, almost pleading with him. “Is that too much to ask?”

A RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

 

“She what?”
Buzzy slurped at the foam erupting like lava from the top of his can. “What did you tell her?”

“Nothing. I was in a state of shock.”

“I can imagine.”

“I mean, we're just sitting there, having this great afternoon, and Bam!”

Dave was indignant. She had no right to ask him to quit the band. Playing music wasn't just some stupid sideline; it was what he did with his life. If he'd been a doctor, she wouldn't have asked him to quit performing surgery. She wouldn't have asked a cop to turn in his badge. It signified a lack of respect, not only for his chosen profession, but for him—her future husband—as an individual.

“What was her reasoning?” Buzzy had his head thrown back like Popeye, mouth wide open to receive the last precious drops of Meister Bräu dribbling out of his upended can. He could drain a beer faster than anyone Dave had ever known.

“Saturday night. She doesn't want to be stuck home alone while I'm out playing a gig.”

“It's a problem,” said Buzzy. “Just ask Stan.”

“What am I supposed to do? People don't get married on Tuesday.”

Buzzy dropped his can on the floor and produced a full one from the side pocket of his tuxedo jacket. He popped the top and vacuumed off the foam with fishily puckered lips.

“You wanna know the solution?”

“What?”

“Kids.”

“Please,” said Dave. “Just getting married is scary enough. Don't start tossing kids into the mix.”

“I'm serious,” Buzzy insisted. “Once you got kids, having fun on Saturday night isn't even an option. The whole argument is moot.”

“Kids are a long ways off,” Dave assured him. “A vague rumor from a distant galaxy.”

Buzzy shrugged. “It worked for us. Before Jo Ann got pregnant, she was into that whole death metal thing—the spike bracelets, the white makeup, the whole nine yards. Her idea of a balanced meal was a Diet Coke to wash down her speed. Now she's the only mother in the PTA who can name all the guys in Anthrax.”

Dave had only met JoAnn once, but she'd made an impression. She was a skinny, tired-looking woman with stringy, dishwater blond hair and pants so tight—they were some sort of spandex/denim blend that zipped up in the back—you had to worry about her circulation. No matter what anyone said, her expression remained fixed somewhere between boredom and indifference. Dave didn't think she was in danger of being elected president of the PTA anytime soon.

“Did she ever bug you about quitting the band?” he asked.

Buzzy shook his head. “Only thing like that, she made me sell my bike.”

“Bicycle bike? Or motorcycle?”

“Motor,” Buzzy replied, pausing mid-chug to see if Dave was putting him on. “I had me a beautiful Harley.”

“I didn't know that.”

“Oh yeah. Jo loved to ride it too. We had matching helmets and everything. Used to ride all over the place with this club I was in, stoned out of our minds. Amazing I'm even here to tell about it.”

“So what happened?”

“This guy we knew wiped out in a rainstorm one night. Billy Farell. He was in a coma for three months.”

“He came out?”

“Yeah. Seems okay too. He was a little off to begin with, so you can't really tell the difference. After that, though, Jo said she'd leave me if I didn't get rid of the bike.”

“You miss it?”

Buzzy polished off the second beer and deposited the empty on the floor, which Dave used as a storage area for cassettes and their boxes, separate entities he kept meaning to reunite. He wanted to ask Buzzy to stop treating his car like a garbage can, but didn't want to come across as one of those neat freaks who act like their vehicle is some sort of sacred space, not to be defiled by evidence of human habitation, burger wrappers or the odd plastic fork.

“I dream about it,” Buzzy said. “Every night. Before I fall asleep.”

Dave's car was stopped at a red light. Buzzy grabbed a pair of imaginary handlebars and pulled back on the throttle. Except for the tuxedo, he looked a little like Dennis Hopper. The expression on his face was pure ecstasy, sexual transport.

“Every night,” he repeated, as Dave shifted into first and eased up on the clutch of his Metro. “Nothing else even comes close.”

The Westview Manor was an enormous, windowless banquet complex on Route 22 that could—and often did—accommodate as many as four different receptions at the same time. Despite the congested feel of the place and the less-than-soundproof dividers that separated bands in adjoining rooms, the Wishbones considered it a decent venue. Unlike some of the snootier halls in the area, which required musicians to enter through the kitchen and generally went out of their way to make them feel like gate-crashers, the Westview treated “the entertainment” with a certain amount of respect. The Wishbones could arrive through the front door like normal human beings, relax in a conference room during their breaks, and grab an occasional beer or soda from the bar without feeling like criminals. One way or another, they usually managed to get themselves fed, an occupational perk once taken for granted by wedding musicians, but currently optional-at-best in the general atmosphere of belt-tightening and stinginess that had overtaken the country.

Dave and Buzzy stopped in the lobby to check the directory. It was a classy touch, removable white letters on a field of black velvet, the kind of thing you might find by the elevator in a building full of doctors.

“There we are,” said Buzzy. “Lambrusco-DiNardo. Black Forest Room, Second Floor.”

Except for Artie and a couple of waitresses tucking crown-shaped napkins into the water glasses, the Black Forest Room was empty. An expectant hush hung over the dais, the bar, the stage, the dance floor, the twenty or so round tables draped in starched white cloths, loaded down with plates and baskets of bread and water pitchers and floral centerpieces, the whole shebang ready and waiting. Dave wished he could describe for Julie the subtle thrill he felt entering a room like this in his crisply pressed (thanks, Mom)
tuxedo, and walking straight over to the bandstand like he owned it.

Artie glanced up from the charts he was writing to acknowledge their arrival. Whatever else people might say about him, Artie was on top of things. In his two years with the band, Dave had yet to arrive at a gig before Artie, or even before Artie had singlehandedly managed to set up the entire sound system—amps, PA, monitors, mikes, soundboard—all of which he stored in his garage and transported in his van to avoid screwups. The individual Wishbones were responsible solely for their uniforms and instruments.

Reverently, Dave lifted his sunburst Les Paul out of its lush, coffinlike case, double-checking to make sure he'd remembered to bring an extra set of strings and half a dozen picks. He plugged into a battery-operated tuning gizmo and tuned up quickly and silently, a vast improvement over the bad old days of loud public tuning. Without turning on his amp, he ran through a few blues scales and jazz progressions to limber up, then unhooked the tooled leather strap Julie had given him for Christmas a couple of years before, and set the Les Paul carefully in its metal tripod stand, stepping back for a moment to admire its classic beauty.

Without a doubt, it was the most versatile, sweetest-sounding guitar he'd ever owned. The Wishbones played a dizzying variety of music—everything from “Havah Nagilah” to “Louie Louie,” as Artie liked to say—and the Les Paul was the only guitar Dave knew of that could handle the whole range without breaking a sweat. It wouldn't make sense, owning a top-flight instrument like that and not being able to play it loud for an audience. He might as well sell it at a loss and buy some chintzy Hagstrom to plunk in his bedroom like a three-chord teenage amateur.

He checked his watch. It was five-fifteen, forty-five minutes before cocktail hour. Buzzy had wandered off somewhere and Artie was flirting with one of the waitresses. Dave thought he might head downstairs and give Julie a call from the pay phone. Their
afternoon had ended on a sour note, and it seemed to him they still had some talking to do.

One of the downstairs weddings was just getting under way. Dave stood at the base of the stairs and watched the guests drift through the lobby, dressed up and smiling, some of them bearing gifts. There were jobs, he thought—dentist, prison guard, clerk at the DMV—that brought you into daily contact with a clientele that was angry, bitter, or scared. It had to take a toll, strain your faith in humanity. But playing in a wedding band exposed you to the other side. It was hard to imagine that the festive crowd in the Westview Manor that Saturday evening had anything to do with the shuffling, muttering malcontents you might see on line at the DMV, though, obviously, there had to be some overlap.

On the way to the phone, he heard the soft strains of cocktail music and ducked his head into the Birnam Wood Room to see who was providing the entertainment. Instead of a bandstand, there was a card table full of stereo equipment set up at the far end of the dais, flanked by two unreasonably large speaker columns. A banner strung across the edge of the table read:

ROCKIN’ RANDY PRODUCTIONS

 

The DJ Who Comes to Play

 

 

Presiding over the table was Rockin’ Randy himself, a cocky young guy in a sharkskin suit (it was a shade of metallic blue Dave associated with new Toyotas), wearing state-of-the-art square headphones and swaying his head and shoulders to the languid rhythms of Anita Baker. His eyes were closed; his hair looked like it had been marinated in Valvoline. Dave felt irritated and superior at the same time, the way he always did in the presence of DJs. They were
a revolting breed, scam artists who'd somehow managed to convince the world that it took talent to remove CDs from a plastic case while simultaneously babbling into a microphone.

Rockin’ Randy
, he thought.
Why do I know that name?

As though his ear muffs picked up brainwaves, Randy unlidded his eyes and looked straight at Dave. By way of greeting, he turned his hands into pistols and fired several shots in the direction of the door, using both barrels in rapid succession. Then he blew on his fingertips to cool them off and calmly returned to his dancing, spinning one fist over the other while bobbing his head around in a moronic fashion.

Dave looked away in disgust. Aside from the dense clump of guests bearing down on the bartender, the room was sparsely populated by early birds loading up on hors d'oeuvres. He was startled—but only for a second—to see Buzzy lurking at the edge of the dance floor, beer in hand, reaching out like a friend of the family to snag a cocktail weenie from a passing tray.

He dropped the quarter into the slot and played the abbreviated touch-tone tune that was Julie's number (it sounded like the intro to “Peace Train,” the Cat Stevens anthem later covered by 10,000 Maniacs). The pay phone was located right outside the ladies’ “lounge,” an arrangement that didn't offer a lot of privacy, especially since it seemed like every woman who arrived at the West-view made a beeline for the rest room. The night was young, but already a line had formed and was snaking out the door.

“Yes?” Dolores answered with her customary gasp, as though she'd been sitting by the phone, awaiting ransom instructions from a kidnapper.

“Hi, Mrs. Müller.”

“Oh, hi Dave.”

“Julie around?”

“She's right here. We're making stuffed peppers. I'll put her on.”

Several seconds elapsed. Dave listened to nothing while surreptitiously admiring a woman in a daring black dress who was rummaging through her purse while waiting her turn for the bathroom. The dress was sleeveless and defiantly short; its back plunged in a dramatic V held together by a web of crisscrossing laces. She didn't really have the body to carry it off—the dress seemed loose where it was supposed to be tight and vice versa —but Dave appreciated the effort anyway. Risky fashion statements were part of what kept his job interesting week after week.

“Yeah?” Julie's voice was all business.

“Hey.” He turned away from the woman, who seemed vaguely puzzled by the contents of her purse. “What's up?”

“Didn't you hear?” Julie's bubbly tone was incomprehensible except as sarcasm. “We're making stuffed peppers.”

“Sounds exciting.”

“Yeah, and after that, Uncle Danny and Aunt Dot are coming over to play cards. They're bringing a No-Fat cheesecake.”

“No-Fat? Is that possible?”

“Apparently. The word on the street is that you can't taste the difference.”

Dave wanted to make a joke about Danny and Dottie, both of whom were fatter than ever since their discovery of the brave new world of lite desserts, but this didn't seem like the right time to be poking fun at her relatives.

“So,” she said. “Anything else I can help you with?”

“Not really. I just had a little down time and wanted to see how you were doing.”

“I'm fine.”

“Great.”

“You don't sound like you believe me.”

“Why wouldn't I believe you?”

“I don't know.” Her voice was flat and chilly. “Why don't you tell me.”

Dave breathed an inaudible sigh. He felt like apologizing, even though he hadn't done anything wrong. If anything, she owed
him
an apology.

“Listen,” he said. “Why don't you go to a movie or something?”

“By myself?”

“You could call Tammi.”

“I already did. She's got plans.”

“Lots of people go to the movies by themselves.”

“Not me,” she said. “Not on Saturday night.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don't feel like having two hundred couples staring at me, wondering why I can't find a date, okay? That's not my idea of a good time.”

“What, you'd rather hang around with Dottie and Danny eating No-Fat cheesecake? That's your idea of a good time?”

Julie didn't answer, and he quickly spotted his blunder. After fifteen years, he should have known better than to make her points for her.

“I have to go,” she said sweetly. “It's time to stuff the peppers.”