Tricky Business (17 page)

Tonight was critical. It was exactly seven days from the initial card placement, and the only two bandmates still in the pool were Johnny, who'd bet on six days, and Ted, who'd put his money on an even week. Thus there was considerable tension in the room, or at least in the band, when Ted, his bandmates watching closely, went down the row of chafing dishes. There were eight of them, and as of the seventh one, Ted had found nothing. Painstakingly, he began poking through the eighth, and . . .

“YES!” he shouted, reaching into the chafing dish, pulling out the dripping card, holding it aloft.

“Shit,” said Johnny.

“Emeril,” said Ted, “you da MAN!”

Emeril, from his stool, continued glaring into the distance.

“What do you think,” Ted asked the band, “you want to start another pool?”

“I don't know, man,” said Wally. “Maybe we should warn somebody about this. I mean, what if somebody
eats
this? They could
die.
”

“The way I see it,” said Johnny, “anybody who eats this
wants
to die.”

“That's a point,” said Wally.

So Ted slid the Cliff Floyd card back into whatever it was in the chafing dish, and the band started a new pool, with Jock taking two more days, Wally three, Johnny six, and Ted betting on another full week.

“I have faith in Emeril,” he said. “The man is
loyal
to this food.”

With that settled, they set up their equipment and tuned up. A few minutes before departure time, they went up on the deserted top deck and huddled out of the wind and rain against a stack of rubber lifeboats for one last pre-gig joint. Then they went down and got some beers. Thus prepared for the grim evening ahead, they returned to their instruments and launched into their traditional first number of the evening, a blues instrumental in the key of whoever started playing first.

This was a little game the band played. Jock, a purely self-taught idiot savant of rhythm, would start off on the drums with a hypersyncopated introduction whose structure was deeply obscure, sometimes even to Jock. Wally and Ted would listen hard, competing to see who could discern the tempo first; the winner would jump in, playing in the key of his choice. If Wally started, he'd usually go with A or E, easy guitar-player keys, where you can mess around with open strings. If Ted jumped in first, he'd pick something more convenient for a keyboardist, but worse for a guitarist, like F. If, as sometimes happened, Wally and Ted started simultaneously, they'd play musical chicken, each trying to force the other to yield. Johnny would usually end the Battle of the Keys by coming in with his bass on one side or the other, unless he felt like playing in a
third
key, in which case the band would usually be laughing too hard to keep going.

Tonight, Ted had cleanly won the faceoff, picking B-flat, and they'd jammed for ten minutes, getting into it, taking their solos, trading fours for a while, not caring that nobody was listening to them, because they were listening to one another. This was Wally's favorite thing about being in the band—the time when they'd just started playing, had just soared free, for the moment, from the swamp of failure and rejection they were usually mired in, and they were tuned up good and had a little buzz on, and they were doing the one thing they really knew how to do, and damned if it didn't sound all right. That's what always struck Wally when they started a gig:
We sound pretty good.
Not great, but pretty damned good. Wally figured they were as good at making music as most businessmen were at whatever business thing they did. The difference, of course, was that even semicompetent businessmen could make money, whereas even very good musicians could go their entire lives without owning a decent car. But still, this part was fun, just the playing.

It usually became a lot less fun when they had to stop making music and start trying to entertain. Wally, as he had been since the days at Bougainvillea High, was the front man. Reluctantly, he turned from his bandmates, toward the microphone.

“We'd like to welcome you all to the party deck of the fabulous
Extravaganza of the Seas,
” he said. “You look like a great crowd out there!”

At the moment, the crowd consisted of those few people poking through the buffet and buying drinks at the bar, and three dudes, each holding a Bud Light and wearing a ball cap turned around backward, standing at the edge of the dance floor, watching the band with expressions that said: Don't even
think
about entertaining us.

“We're Johnny and the Contusions, and we'll be playing for you all night long,” said Wally. “We want you to have a good time, so if you have any requests, let us know, OK?”

“Play quieter!” shouted one of the Bud Light dudes, and the other two cracked up.

“Ha ha, good one!” said Wally. “We never heard that one before.” He looked around at the band. “Have we?”

“Never,” said Ted.

The shouter dude frowned, not sure how to take this.

“Anyway,” said Wally, “we want to remind everybody that the world-famous
Extravaganza of the Seas
all-you-can-eat buffet is open, with some unforgettable classic dishes prepared by our award-winning chef; ladies and gentlemen, give it up for the culinary genius we call . . . Emeril!”

Jock hit a rim shot. There was no other reaction in the room.

“Thank you,” said Wally. “Ladies and gentlemen, you are a beautiful crowd, and we'd like to kick things off for you with a party song, because it's a party ship, and a party kind of night, and . . . the tiki bar is OPEN!”

Wally went straight from there into chopping out the minor chords for the John Hiatt song “Tiki Bar.” The other guys smiled, because this was a song they
never
did; this was pure self-indulgence on the part of Wally. But they jumped right in, Johnny walking the bass line, Jock pounding on the two and the four, Ted doubling Jock on the keyboard. Wally growled the lyrics, Hiatt-style, and all three bandmates joined him to shout out the chorus:

They had one dancer for this song: a tall, cadaverously skinny man who bore a startling resemblance to Strom Thurmond and who, to judge by the way he weaved over from the bar, had been drinking nonstop since roughly 1967. He stood in the middle of the dance floor and, looking down at his feet, concentrating hard, did a slow but determined version of the Funky Chicken.

Wally sang two verses of “Tiki Bar” and then took a solo, keeping it short but getting some nice riffs in there, grabbing a beer bottle and playing slide guitar for the last two bars. The band finished the song with a perfectly synchronized stop, then a nice little reprise ending, strong and tight, as if they'd practiced it for years. They were rewarded with: nothing. Strom Thurmond kept dancing, apparently unaware that the band had stopped playing. Across the room, a few bold buffet pioneers continued their search for edible food. The Bud Light dude who'd told them to play quieter stuck out his fist and, when he caught Wally's eye, made a thumbs-down gesture. This cracked the other two dudes up.

“Thank you!” said Wally. “Thank you very much.”

Strom Thurmond, just now realizing the music had stopped, weaved over to Wally.

“Hey,” he said, emitting a cloud of whiskey fumes that made Wally's head jerk back. “Play that song.”

“Which song would that be?” said Wally.

“You know that song,” said the man. “About the thing. With the car.”

Wally looked over at Ted.

“Ted,” he said. “Do you know that song about the thing? With the car?”

“Sure,” said Ted. “We'll get to that in the next set.”

“OK,” said Strom Thurmond, who made the OK sign with his hand, then fell down. This was not totally his fault; the ship had moved discernibly. Usually it was very steady, but tonight, in the storm, it had a definite rolling feeling. Slowly, with great concentration, Strom Thurmond struggled back up on his feet. Once he was fully erect, he made the OK sign again, almost losing his balance a second time, but making a nice save.

Wally leaned into the microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “right now for your continued enjoyment, we're gonna let Mr. Ted Brailey on the keyboards here do a little Van Morrison for you.”

Johnny counted “two, three, four” and they were into “Moondance,” that staple of a zillion bar mitzvahs and wedding receptions, a song that the Contusions, like most bands, could play in a coma. Strom Thurmond resumed the Funky Chicken. A few more people were in the room now, passengers wandering around the ship, waiting for it to get to the three-mile limit. The veterans went straight to the bar; the newcomers headed for the buffet, from which they recoiled in various stages of horror.

The band, having had its musical fun, was now on autopilot. From “Moondance,” it would go into a set of similarly mellow, easy-listening, low-stress tunes, to which, on most nights, hardly anybody would listen—the band members themselves would basically tune out—and nobody would dance. Once the casino opened below, there would rarely be any passengers in the room at all. This is the way it was every night on the
Extravaganza of the Seas.

But tonight something different happened. Midway through “Moondance,” a group of giggling women emerged from the stairway and flowed onto the dance floor, eight of them, young and attractive, especially for
Extravaganza
passengers. Wally guessed that they were a bachelorette party; they'd obviously been partying hard for a while. They began dancing directly in front of the band, which responded by finishing “Moondance” early and going straight into the Commodores' “Brick House,” a song that, in the band's experience, was a lot of fun to watch women wearing tight, low-cut tops dance to. They responded nicely and, when the song ended, applauded.

“So,” said Wally, into his microphone. “Is somebody celebrating a special occasion tonight?”

“Yes!” said several, pointing to a petite woman with short blonde hair. “Connie!”

“And is the lovely Connie getting married?” asked Wally.

“Nope,” said Connie. “Divorced!”

“Congratulations!” said Wally. “Who's the lucky guy?”

“An asshole,” said Connie. This set off a round of whoops and high-fives among the women. One of them high-fived Strom Thurmond, who went back down like a sack of grain. As some women helped him back up, Wally asked Connie: “Is there anything special you'd like the band to play?”

“Yes,” said Connie.

“What?” said Wally.

Connie pointed at Jock and said, “I'd like him to play doctor with me.”

The women whooped; Johnny spat out his beer in mid-swig; Wally and Ted exchanged laughs. They were used to women hitting on Jock, but this was an indoor record.

“How about it, Dr. Jock?” said Wally. “You want to play doctor with Connie here? Help her through this difficult time in her life?”

Jock pointed a drumstick at Connie and said, “You are looking
fine
tonight.” More whoops from the women. Connie did a little bump and grind, inadvertently knocking into Strom Thurmond, who went down again.

“I feel a lot of love in this room,” said Wally. “This calls for a very special song, a very romantic song, a very tender song for this very special lady, Connie, on her very special night.”

Then he stomped on his distortion pedal, cranked up his volume knob and slashed out the opening riff to “I Want Your Sex Pootie,” by the Seminal Fluids. Jock caught it instantly and came in right behind him, and in a heartbeat everybody on the floor, including Strom Thurmond, was bouncing up and down, chanting with Wally:

There were more people coming up the stairs now, drawn by the noise. Some of them watched; some of them joined the dancers, a couple dozen out there now. This was, by far, the best response the band had gotten on the
Extravaganza
: an actual audience, including actual babes, actually dancing. As the band reached the end of “Sex Pootie,” Wally shot a glance back at Jock to let him know that he was going to keep it moving and blasted into the high-energy opening chords, E-A-D-A, of the Romantics' “What I Like About You.” The crowd responded as it always did to that song, a song so danceable that even middle-aged white men can sometimes locate the beat.

Still more people were coming up the stairs. Even the Bud Light dudes drifted onto the floor, assuming the pseudo-soulful facial expression of men dancing and insinuating themselves into the clot of gyrating divorce-party women. Somebody bumped into Strom Thurmond and he went down again, but this time he wisely elected to stay on the floor and dance in a prone position.

As “What I Like About You” ended, the band followed Wally right into AC-DC's “You Shook Me All Night Long,” which begins with a tender couplet of almost Shakespearean eloquence:

Midway through the song, Connie, the grieving divorcée, pulled up her top and flashed her breasts at Jock, although the rest of the band was in a position to benefit visually. The dance floor was actually crowded now; Wally saw all ages and types out there, old people and young people, and . . . Jesus, was that a
shell
?

Sure enough, out there in the middle of the mob, clearly disoriented, flailing his pink arms around, was Conrad Conch. He'd come up the stairs and started feeling his way toward the buffet when somebody had grabbed him and pulled him onto the dance floor, where he was being bounced from dancer to dancer like a giant pink beach ball. He got shoved toward the band, where the divorce-party women surrounded him and began feigning lewd acts of human-mollusk sex, one of them dropping onto her knees and applying her mouth vigorously to what would be the penile area of the shell, if conchs had penises. The crowd was going insane, stomping its feet and cheering the women on. At the microphone, Wally was laughing so hard that he had to stop singing.