Whale Music (14 page)

The stars are stagnant tonight. The Great and Little Bears are hibernating. Orion has taken off his belt, laid down his sword, he’s eating a TV dinner and watching “I Love Lucy.” I’ve popped outside for a breath of fresh air because I do not feel well. I am having some kind of a reaction. Hot flashes, chills, convulsions, nausea.

I need drugs.

Let’s check the music room. You look over there, I’ll poke around the control room. I must calm down if I mean to do any serious Whale Work. I’m going to work on the Song of Congregation. I have a plan; it requires intoxicants and plenty of ’em. The control room, however, is clean as a bone, it looks like Farley O’Keefe might have preceded me.

The mention of that name is not likely to help me in my particular state. Indeed, it adds a certain urgency to this stimulant-finding mission. Check behind the speakers, check inside the speaker cones. Farley O’Keefe, former college football hero. Hero, that is, until he bit off an opposing player’s ear. That’s not even the first time that’s happened, but Farley walked back to the line of scrimmage
chewing
. A scurrilous knave, Farley O’Keefe. A real fucking prick. (Do you see the trumpet and horn cases? Check inside the velvet pockets, check inside the flaps meant for concealing mouthpieces.) A huge man, increasing amplitudes of muscle ultimately adorned by a tiny head. Farley sported a handlebar moustache, he wore spectacles when he wasn’t beating someone (usually me) to a
pulp. Somewhere along the way (the drums, the drums, pick up each separate unit and rattle it, please) Farley O’Keefe acquired the knack of sounding both intelligent and hip (he was neither), he was forever brandishing some book in your face, Hermann Hesse or Ayn Rand, and saying, “Simplistic, but all right in its way.” When he dies I mean to drive a wooden stake through his heart.

Did you just burp? What was that chilling sound, extremely unhealthy effluvium? I don’t think it was me, it seemed to come from over there.

Over by the Yamaha 666.

I think they may have gotten in over their heads when they invented this particular beast. There’s a rumour that Stevie Wonder is having trouble with his machine, which probably means the Yamaha 666 is chasing him around the house. We are the only two people, as far as I know, who own a Yamaha 666 (they cost many hundreds of thousands), except for a studio in Glendale, which purchased one and burned down that same night.

The Yamaha 666 gives forth another reboant snarl. That it isn’t plugged in means nothing to the Yamaha 666. The keyboards, seven of them, are curved and cantilevered, they produce an enormous pool of shadow, but as I take a cautious step forward a light flashes from within the darkness. The Yamaha 666 emits another sound, gentler this time, almost a purr. The light flashes again, a reflection off glass. I stumble quickly towards it and find, perched on the middle keyboard, one entire bottle of bourbon. As I pick it up a little tube of paper rolls forward, waterfalling down the keyboards, and before it has hit the ground I’ve recognized it as a joint, a number, a bomber.

Now we’re set. I mean to wash the humanness out of my system, then I can work on the “Song of Congregation” and get it right.

I think the Yamaha 666 likes me, that’s what I think. It’s too bad I didn’t own it when Farley O’Keefe was around (in the
employ of my wife Fay) because I could have locked Farley in the music room overnight, and I’m pretty sure that in the morning he would have been disappeared, perhaps all but his curly moustache.

This bourbon is good stuff, it makes me feel a bit better. I can’t even recall precisely why I felt poorly to begin with. Liquor has a bad reputation around these parts (I am in large part responsible), but it can have a very beneficial effect. And it was Farley O’Keefe’s ignominious task to keep me and booze forever separated. He was also paid to maintain distance between me and pharmaceuticals. This is, you’ll agree, not fit employment for a grown man, but at least it’s better than his sideline.

You see where humanness gets you? I have just roared, a scream originated deep within my belly and came rushing out. I am decidedly miserable now. If Farley were here he would
tsk
his tongue, he would fold those thick arms across his chest and sigh, “Des, what are you doing to yourself?” Easy for him to say, O’Keefe never drank. What would be the use? The liquor would travel around his endless miles of bloodstream searching uselessly for the little brain. Even if I could come up with a good answer, such as
eradicating humanness
, Farley O’Keefe would remain unimpressed. “You don’t want me to get physical, do you, Des? I detest violence, Des. It would hurt me more than you.” So why aren’t you walking around with contusions all over your body, Farley? “Life is beautiful, Des. Wake up and look at it.” When did this happen, this beautification of life? The most one can do is try to produce some pitiful piece of prettiness, a song, and send it out into the world, a cripple dressed in rags.
Agh, agh
. I should be working. The “Song of Congregation”, the remaining movement of the Whale Music. But I am immobile, I am cataleptic. An image pops into my mind, it’s time for the daily Memory Matinee.

Up the stairs, down the hallway, into what is jokingly referred to as the master bedroom.

You see, Farley was successful for a while. I got clean, I even took to donning a suit and going to the Galaxy building every morning at nine o’clock. I had my own office there, the door had a sign that said
DESMOND HOWL, PRIVATE
, and I would enter and tinker on the piano. I wrote “Sunset” under those circumstances, a mega-hit, number one for seven months. That one charted in Kotzebue. At five o’clock I would repack my briefcase, leave the office building, nodding at all the executives and secretaries. “Afternoon, Mr. Howl.” “Good day, Mr. Howl.” I would bestow a smile and a nod upon these lackies. It was not a bad life. It was boring, but excitement is highly overrated. I likely would have kept it up indefinitely. Except one day I became very tired at two in the afternoon. There was no music within me, which happens sometimes. The ringing in my ears moved front and centre, it vibrated until it worked up a headache of heroic proportions. I decided that I must go home. Which I did. I entered my house, wandered upstairs, only to find Fay and Farley O’Keefe naked in the master bedroom. Very grim. Worse, Fay was humped over and administering a bee-jay, something she was ever unwilling to do to me. Farley O’Keefe’s member was a gruesome thing, ribbed with purple veins.
Bing, bing
, went the heartstrings,
boing
went the tenuous grasp on reality. I flew down to the kitchen and located the cooking sherry.

Since then I have known only confusion. Farley was fired, Fay was given the boot. Lawyers chewed through the woodwork. Dr. Tockette appeared with appalling regularity. Danny drove his new silver Porsche through a guardrail. The car burst into flame as it smacked the surface of the Pacific Ocean. The whales gathered to watch the pyrotechnical display. It seems like years that I have been labouring on the Whale Music, but great care has been given to get it exactly right. There have been no bright spots in my life. Except, I guess, for the strange creature from Toronto.

Agh, agh
. I must summon the wherewithal to work. I wonder
how this eradication-of-humanness process is doing. Half of the bourbon is gone, the scrawny ill-made cigarette has been rendered into clouds. I would judge that the process is working, except that I seem to be weeping. A very bad sign. Whales do not weep. They make outraged bellows, which is what I should be doing. Wait though. Here’s a thought. I have been working on the “Song of Congregation”, and the call has been
come on over, whales
. Surely the whales can only think, why bother, if they’ve had a better offer (if a school of baitfish is travelling nearby, a huge shimmering cloud of munchables) at best the whales might ask for a raincheck. If, however, I incorporate the outraged bellow, if I howl at the vagaries of fate, the whales might figure, hey, he’s playing our tune. What do you think? It’s certainly worth a try. Given the way I feel right now, the outraged bellow should be no problem.

A final sip of the bourbon, I struggle to my feet.

I’m going to use the Yamaha 666. This is going to be a Beast solo. No drums, rhythms are manmade, they have nothing to do with the world. No guitars, they are too mathematical, too much the division of frequencies. Only the Beast. If I survive, I shall be the world’s greatest Yamaha 666 player. I take off my bathrobe, toss it into the corner. Man against Beast. Pure and elemental. I wipe my palms free of moisture. I crack the knuckles, I do digital exercises. The Yamaha 666 is already humming, it is taunting me, daring me to plug it in, to feed it juice. The Yamaha 666 can sense fear, so I move without hesitation, tossing in the wallplug nonchalantly. The Beast lets out an ungodly ululation. I pretend not to notice. Electrical cross-currents swim in the gloom. I throw switches, I slap buttons, I slide faders. The Beast is cowed for a moment, but as I’m about to put my fingers down it roars defiantly. I kick it in its underbelly! There is silence. Then, closing my eyes, I begin to play.

(And Dewey stomps up from his vocal basement,
a-pow-pow-pow, you got to …)

Let’s face it, ladies and gentlemen, the chorus to perhaps my most famous songs does nothing but go “Kiss me, Karen” over and over again. It is the popular song equivalent of a circle jerk in the shower room, but it does possess a certain urgency. The father hated the song, between takes he’d lean back and roar, “Kiss him, Karen, for Christ’s sake!” Even Dan disliked the song, he pulled me aside and said, “Desmo, I got to tell you, kissing this girl was like sucking a sponge.” He didn’t know we’d passed into the realm of art. All I knew is that it made a lot of sense rhythmically if five young men chanted “Kiss me,
Karen” over and over again, but great care had to be taken not to get boring. So what did I do? I got positively baroque. Freaky Freddy couldn’t feed me empty tracks fast enough. There’s as many as fifty separate voices on that chorus, they weave in and out, collide like bumper cars. Freddy set up Sal Goneau’s drum kit in an adjunctive garage, he ladled on heaps of echo and phasing, the result sounded like someone taking out their trash in the Twilight Zone. Dewey’s bass was fine-tuned electronically until it achieved awesome purity. Monty still had his special screwdriver-altered amplifier (he dared not bring another, lest Fred Head pull a similar stunt), and I was by this time much enamoured of electronics myself, I’d rigged up a special pre-amp that functioned as a sort of overdrive, forcing too much juice into the speakers, so that what finally trickled out was high-octane white gold.

Yes sir, I don’t believe the Howl Brothers ever functioned as well again as we did that day. It was magic, it was a time we’d spend years trying to rediscover. Magic is a hard thing to hold on to.

But we had it that day. When we were finished recording “Kiss Me, Karen” b/w “My Baby Burnt Out My Clutch,” Kenneth Sexstone pranced to the middle of the room and said,“Thank you, boys. You have just made me filthy rich.” We all started to grin. Even the father grinned, despite what was happening to him in the outside world, where the piece of granite he used for a heart was getting shattered. The father grinned because he knew what was about to happen. Within two weeks of its release, the record was number one in the United States of America.

Success, success, it’s time for all hell to break loose!

You can take my word for it, it certainly is fun, at least for a while, being one of the more famous people in the world. For one thing, people notice you. Complete strangers stop dead in their tracks and gawk, people who under other circumstances wouldn’t give you the time of day. Do you know that feeling,
when you’re buying shoes, and the clerk is racing here and there, up to nothing more, it seems, than ignoring you? Well, become famous and those guys will race out onto the sidewalk with all sizes and colours balanced on their heads. And as for girls, my my. Formerly my interaction with the opposite sex was largely stammered inanities. It didn’t take long before I was talking to them like Danny: “Oh, hi, Caroline. You’re looking very sweet today. Say, Caroline, do you think that if we were to step into that bus shelter over there you could give me a little bee-jay?”

We were on the cover of magazines, the five of us grinning like idiots from newsstands across the nation. We had to do countless interviews, and it was at one such interview that I made the reacquaintance of the strange kid with the too-big glasses, Geddy Cole. His spectacles were no longer oversized, his acne was clearing a bit, but he was still a startlingly odd chap. He worked for a rag called
Rockin Rods
a music/car journal, a genre that flourished at the same time we did (no coincidence), and Geddy Cole demanded to know my preferences in clothes, food and automobiles. I had stock answers for all these, citing Monty Mann’s taste in clothes, Danny’s in automobiles, my own in food. When the interview was done, Geddy asked if I wanted to go “catch some tunes.” Geddy and I had shared some scrawny cigarettes, zombie reefer it was, and the notion of “catching tunes” appealed to me, so the strange kid and I went out. Before we went, though, Geddy reached into his pocket and removed some pills. Oblong pills, bright yellow.