Whale Music (6 page)

It seems to me that I recently had some intention of going to bed. What a noble intention that was, wouldn’t Dr. Tockette have been pleased. Now I’m going to sleep, but unfortunately getting to bed is more or less out of the question.

Oh, dreamtime. Peachy. There’s nothing I like better than these little features. My mind has hired a really shlocky director, some asshole who affects a monocle and talks with a thick Brooklyn accent. He favours gratuitous nudity, graphic violence. Today the boor has decided to redo the death scene. “Okay, okay,” he shouts at his underlings. “Light the car!” A silver Porsche is illuminated. My brother Daniel sits behind the wheel. Danny looks good, bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked. Women crowd the side of the road, fawning. A few faint. Slowly Danny depresses the accelerator. The Porsche rolls forward a few feet. “Cut!” yells Cecil B. “Good stuff, Dan-Dan!” Daniel climbs out of the car, goes over to stand with his adoring female public. “Stand-in!” shouts the director.

Stud E. Baker leaps forward. “Rock and roll!” he shouts, gyrating his pelvis. The outline of a thick monkey-dong causes much giggling along the sidelines. Stud E. Baker removes his Confederate Army cap for a brief moment of solemnity. “If I don’t pull this off,” he announces, “and I don’t see how the fuck I
could
, I just want you all to know that it’s been a gas.”

“Stop!” That’s me shouting. I am invited to my own nightmares, after all. “Don’t do it!”

“Forgive me, Desmond.”

I am silent.

“Okee-fedoke.” Stud E. Baker climbs into the silver Porsche. He places his snakeskin boot on the gas pedal, works the revs up. “Quality machine,” he announces. Stud places his right hand on the stick-shift. “It’s one for the money!” he sings.

“Two for the show,” I mumble.

“Three to get ready,” chorus the scantily clad beauties along the roadway.

“And go, cats, go!” Stud E. Baker throws the machine into gear, the teeth bite with fury, a lion clamping its maw around the flank of a gazelle. He runs through second, third, fourth, within seconds he has the Porsche in overdrive. And then Stud E. Baker turns the wheel softly to the right. Through the guardrail. For long silent moments the silver car flies above the Pacific. The Porsche hits the water with a surprisingly soft sound. A moment later comes the explosion.

The whales surface cautiously, curious looks in their large sad eyes.

“Fawk.”

I sense a presence in the room. Moreover, I sense a shoe in my tummy.

“What is with you, Desmerelda?”

In my state it would be a mug’s game to play along with every apparition that happened by. I decide to ignore this one, which is huge and black.

“You have accumulated some avoirdupois there, baby. You be doing me quite a favour if you would get un-nekkid.”

Pretty pushy for a drug- and liquor-produced figment, wouldn’t you say?

“Well, if I get quadruple scale for watching you lie curled up on the floor, I say fine by me. But I want to see the money.”

Hallucinations have unionized. What is this world coming to? Before long we’ll be as badly off as that ghastly planet that hurt something within the alien Claire.

“Fawk.” The fabrication disappears into a shadow. I tumble briefly back to never-never-land (I don’t sleep, I collapse into these bread-pudding comas, as restful as cattle-drives) until a reveille is sounded on a saxophone, the thirds all pulled bluesily flat. I leap to my feet and peer into the darkness. “You can play the sax?”

“Desmerelda, whom do you think it is?”

“I need a saxophonist.”

“So the lady said.”

“I was going to hire Mooky Saunders, but he’s dead.”

“The hell I am.”

“You’ve returned from beyond the grave?”

“Des-baby, let’s start at the beginning. Hey, Des, it’s Mooky. The lady told me you needed a sax. She called me on the telephone. I am not dead, Des. I never felt better. Okay? Now, see if you can pick up that ball and run with it.”

“Mooky!”

“Touchdown.”

I pull on my bathrobe. I shake Mooky’s hand, which is enormous, nails as big as playing cards. “It’s good to see you.”

“Quite the set-up you got.” Mooky wanders around, touching all my equipment gently. “Quite the play-pen.”

“I’ve been working on Whale Music.”

“W-h-a-l-e or w-a-i-l?”

“And I need you to do dolphins.”

“Dolphins. Fawk. I thought the lady asked could I do ‘Dolphy.’ ”

I play Mooky what I’ve done so far. He tilts his head, his long fingers stroke the air. When it’s through he grins at me. “You crazy.”

“Can you hear the dolphins? They leap through the waves, five or six abreast.”

“I can hear them motherfuckers.”

“Soprano?”

“Absolutely, Desmond. Them is some soprano dolphins.”

“It’s in the key of F, Mook.”

“Could have fooled me, Desmerelda. But if you say so.”

Claire comes into the music room. She is trepidatious, she sets her feet down tentatively. Mooky is warming up, lines of music scoot around the padded walls. Claire comes into the control booth, where I am busy capturing sounds. “Hey,” she says.

“Hello, number twenty-one.”

“Are you hungry, Des?”

“Probably. But I’ve got no time to eat. We’re doing the dolphins.”

“Oh, yeah.” She watches Mooky through the plate of glass. “He sure is big.”

“Echo!” I fire up a reverb unit, the sound opens, the music bubbles up from the bowels of the earth.

“Guess what?” asks Claire. “My butt is raw. I can hardly sit down.”

“I guess you’re just not used to the sun. Our planet is only three stones away, you know, perhaps a tad too close for comfort.”

“You want me to split?”

“No.”

“I just thought that maybe you figured that me and you, you know, and now you’d be kind of peed-off or something and want me to leave.”

“Complete your mission, whatever it may be.”

“My mission?”

Mooky puts on his headphones, sticks his finger into the air. “Turn that up,” he speaks into the microphone. “Drown me in that shit, Desmerelda.”

I crank up his levels until they’d be just about deafening. Mooky gives the A-OK. I rewind, start the tape from the beginning.

The dolphins begin to leap into the sun.

Claire begins to dance. She closes her eyes, extends her arms, and rhythm overtakes her body. Soon she too is leaping, obeying the command. Leap, flee, there is danger here! Jump! Leap! I join the alien and leap as best I can, although I am more earthbound. Wallowed by my lard and sorrow. Claire reaches out one of her small hands. I take it.

I stop leaping, though, when I notice a face pressed against the dark glass window that separates my music room from the rest of the world. The face belongs to my mother.

I don’t know when or where my mother encountered Maurice, but I know she was the first to mention his name in our household. Mantle was the president of Mantlepieces Inc. My mother badgered the father for a very long while, and finally he crumbled, he and Mantle had a meeting, a deal was struck, and Maurice became the father’s publisher.

Maurice Mantle was a tall man with a moustache, and he was bald in a manner suggesting not so much that he’d lost hair, but more that his skull had ripped skyward with determination. Maurice was the first adult male I’d ever encountered who was concerned with his personal appearance. Before that I had thought that most men were like the father, that jackets were meant to look as if they’d been borrowed from a brother-in-law, that part of the tie’s function was to let people know what you’d had for lunch. Maurice Mantle was dapper, almost perfect, and the only reason I say
almost
is that Mantle was always judging himself short of immaculacy, constantly
adjusting sleeve lengths, tugging at his stockings, brushing lint (fairly irritably, I might add, especially given the invisibility of the lint) from his trousers. I think now that these things sartorial were designed to distract the eye from Maurice Mantle’s head, which was resolutely, profoundly bald. Still, I’d have to report that he was a handsome man, and certainly charming. Although I tried not to, I couldn’t help comparing the father to Maurice Mantle, and the father invariably ended up seeming freshly dug-up, like he ate little furry animals and belched swamp-mung.

Maurice Mantle got into the habit of coming over to the house. He’d bring little presents for Danny and myself. I remember he brought me a chromatic harmonica, he brought Danny a baseball that had been signed by all the members of the Los Angeles Dodgers. My mother encouraged Danny and I to call him Uncle Maurice. This we could not do. I called him a respectful Mr. Mantle, Danny usually hailed him as Moe. I know full well that Maurice was coming to see our mother, but he could not set foot inside the house without the father cornering him, ushering him upstairs to the den, where the father would pitch his latest tunes the way he pitched his rubberized doggy-do. “Now this one, Maurice, this one would be perfect for that Presley boy.” Then the father, with his fat finger on the musical pulse of the nation, would pull out a tenor guitar and play something like “The Legend of Pocahontas.”

Meanwhile, Danny and I were spending our time in the basement (my mother often coming down with milk and cookies) composing songs full of automotive imagery.

One day Maurice Mantle was effecting an escape from the father’s den when he heard a sound coming from the basement. He cocked an ear at the top of the stairs, he watched my mother dance around the kitchen. He stared at her muscular calves. “The young fellows?” he asked.

“Torque torque,”
sang my mother.

“That’s catchy.”

My mother did a bit of pelvic rotation. “
Torque torque.”

The father joined them in the kitchen, waving his hands dismissively. “Twaddle,” he pronounced.

“I don’t know,” said Maurice Mantle. “I think we should maybe make a demonstration tape.”

My mother turned around and bobbed her fanny. “
Torque torque
.” If she were not my own mother, I could say lots about her fanny. Just picturing it in my mind makes me queasy.

“Not bad,” said Maurice Mantle.

The father nodded glumly. “I’ll take them into a studio next week,” the father said. “I’ll produce the boys.”

So we went into a studio, the father, Danny and I. It was in a fellow’s garage, and the fellow was distinctly odd, a fat young man with glasses about an inch thick. He sported a brush-cut that allowed plain view of his skull. He dressed in velour, strangely coloured. He was the sort of guy who should have a hobby like flying remote-control airplanes or collecting exotic poisonous snakes, but instead his hobby was sound recording. He had a huge, cumbersome tape recorder and a number of ancient radio microphones. His name was Fred Head, and Danny called him Freaky Fred. So appropriate was the name that Fred Head didn’t seem to care or really notice.

On that first session, I played the portable organ. Dan pounded away on his tambourine, and the father added a bit of
guitar, fey and limp-wristed strumming. Fred Head didn’t much care for the music—he stared straight ahead, or at least he approximated that, because his eyes were sort of crossed—but he seemed to get excited when I mentioned before a run-through that there were two or three different harmonies I could do, that I was having trouble deciding between them.

“Do them all,” he told me.

“I beg your pardon?”

“We can do over-dubs,” he told me. “You can sing over and over again.”

I felt like Van Gogh when he found out that paint comes in different colours. I sang one harmony, a straightforward one, sitting a third above Danny’s melody. Then Fred Head rewound the tape and I added a bass, growling like an engine. Freaky Fred was having fun now, so we added a high falsetto swooper.

“Too much, too much,” said the father.