a biker bar. Decent money, free drinks, invites to party with bikers after the show. Life had been good.
It all fell apart when the bar owner’s questionable accounting practices came under the scrutiny of the IRS and the bar was forced to closed down. Ever since then Mike and I have been trying to throw another band together but for whatever reason the best of plans never materialized into anything.
“What do you think, Chris?” he jabbed. “I know you’re creative and eccentric enough to at least give it some thought.” Yeah, he knew I was creative and eccentric alright.
He had come over one night to give me a ride to the gig, pointing out the irony that I worked as a cab driver yet didn’t have a car of my own. I was running late and after taking a quick shower I found him leaning back in his chair against the radiator reading through my collection of spiral notebooks.
“You mind not going through my personal stuff?” I said.
“Don’t get pissed off. This is some good shit,” he responded. “Man, I write stories and poetry too, but you’ve kicked my ass starting with page one. You ought to get this stuff published, maybe strike it rich and get out of this freaking rat hole.”
Still dripping wet and only wrapped in a towel I walked across the room and pulled a shoe box from a kitchen drawer. The lid wouldn’t even close because it was stuffed beyond capacity with rejection letters from publishers.
“I’m working on that,” I explained, dropping the box on the wobbly kitchen table for effect. I pulled the best one from the top of the stack and handed it to him. Mike read bits of it out loud.
“The run-on sentences with multiple adjectives is stylistically unique… Your dark and gritty style is refreshing but at times a bit too much, putting credibility at risk… Could benefit from some more character development…”
“Hey, how about this?” Mike exclaimed and quoted the closing sentence. “Please revise the work as critiqued and resubmit the next time we are accepting unsolicited manuscripts.”
“Yeah,” I said with disgust. “They went out of business six months later.” So now I was considering Mike’s latest musical project.
“How about calling it Mike Does Spike?” I suggested.
“I dunno. That has some sexual connotations that I’m not sure of,” he said.
“Who’s to say that Spike isn’t some hot chick wearing stilettos?” I countered. I could see his mind was working up a proper pornographic image.
“Nah,” he said. “Mike’s Spike. That’s what we’ll go with.”
You know that disinfectant spray that bowling alleys blast into the rental shoes when you return them? I think that’s the same stuff that thrift stores hose down their clothing with. Flipping thought the racks at a thrift store I felt like I was sniffing hundreds of pairs of rental bowling shoes.
That’s part of the reason I didn’t like shopping at thrift stores. That and the fact that if I did find something I liked, chances are it wasn’t in my size. I was here for only one reason. A band like Mike’s Spike wasn’t going to be just any other band. It would be more of a Show. An Act. It would require wearing clothes that I certainly didn’t already own.
It was impossible to ignore the gold lame’ sport coat. Despite looking shiny and smooth, the texture of the fabric was like fine grit sandpaper. It showed signs of heavy wear and had it not been so unique it probably would have been sorted from a pile of donations into the garbage can. It fit surprisingly well.
“That’s a good look for you,” she said. I turned around to see a short chunky girl with glasses and long brown hair in no particular style. She had an overall look that said low maintenance.
Skin pale, smooth, not pierced and not inked. Skin that would never be allowed to wrinkle to the coarse grain of a landau top under the UV rays of a tanning bed.
“I’ve seen you play piano and read cool weird stuff at the coffee house,” she said.
“Yeah,” was all I said, realizing that I had at least one fan and had been too stupid or too preoccupied with myself to notice. Probably both.
“Putting a new band together,” I explained. “Spike Jones covers. This sport jacket is just right for that sort of thing.”
She agreed. Her name was Leah and despite having lived all her life here on the wrong side of the tracks she glowed with a radiance that could not be tarnished.
Currently holding down a few part time jobs including scraping petrified bird shit from the bottoms of cages at a pet store so she could afford a dumpy little apartment down the street and over a beauty parlor.
Getting over by the university and the coffee house when she could to seek out a sense of culture and the knowledge that there were better things in the world and at a time they would be attained.
Meeting a woman like that is like taking an ice cold drink of water on a sweltering day. Like stepping out to a layer of freshly fallen snow that makes the city feel bright and clean. Time slowed down to a crawl and I realized that she was The One.
Driving a taxi at night is a mixed bag. Taking people home that went to happy hour and didn’t have the sense to leave. The night people going to and coming home from their night jobs and needing a ride. I met people from all walks of life.
The guitar player from the house band at the biker bar once accused me of driving a cab just to get some good material for my writing, but that was not the case. However, there was little doubt that cab driving had provided some inspiration for a few dark gritty passages scribbled down early in the morning.
One thing about the night shift is that sometimes there is a long lapse of time between trips. During such a moment of downtime I drove over to a certain music store I knew too well. I called Charlie on the radio and told him I was out for the library. For an unknown reason that was the code phrase you used when you got out of your car to take a leak.
Diamond Dave was behind the counter, his hair and wardrobe styled so that he closely resembled Eric Clapton. He was chatting it up with a customer. There was a time when he would have pushed that person aside and given me a warm oily welcome and tried to sell me something expensive.
Those days were over as he knew I had fallen on hard times and was now nothing but a nuisance that might waste his time asking endless technical questions and leave greasy fingerprints on pricy merchandise that I could not afford. I slunk down the open stairwell to the basement where a noisy labyrinth of passageways twisted past an endless number of doorways to tiny rooms.
Look through the windows in the doors and you’ll see any type of musical instrument you could imagine, and a teacher willing to show you how to play, providing you had some cash. It was like a musical version of a famous overseas red light district.
Despite the hole riddled sound deadening tiles covering all flat surfaces, the sounds of lessons in progress tore at my ears. Jon was in his usual studio. No student. Fender Strat in hand. He was chugging though a series of power chords and then spiraled into a tangled solo complete with hammer-ons, two handed tapping, precisely bent strings, and notes I had never even heard before.
Jon stopped playing with an abrupt halt, his amp still resonating a squeal of feedback when he noticed me standing in the doorway.
“How’s it going Pooh Bear?” he asked. It was part of his style to always give friends the most absurd greeting possible and this was just one example.
“Still driving a cab,” I said with disgust, but then brightened the mood by telling him about Leah and the few dates we had been on in less than a week. Jon subconsciously rubbed his bare scalp, always blaming his receding hairline for not having any luck with women.
“I even lack credibility as a guitar player,” he once confided in me. “When I walk up to the stage and strap on my guitar people are looking at me funny as if to say, how can he play guitar? He doesn’t have any hair!”
I knew the real reason he didn’t have a woman and it had nothing to do with his hair. It was the fact that he rarely put down his
guitar long enough to find one to ask out.
We had played in a band together once. Even on breaks when I was working the crowd looking for a willing female, Jon would still be up on the stage, amp silent in stand-by mode, but still spastically wheedling away on his guitar. There was no questioning his dedication to the instrument.
“Mike and I are putting a trio together,” I told him. “We’re looking for a third member. I’d ask you but its Spike Jones covers. Figured that if you were doing any kind of tribute act Steely Dan or Pink Floyd would be more your style.” His face was still wincing from the mention of Spike Jones.
“Do you really, actually, honestly, think there is a market for that?” he asked with skepticism and was obviously trying to contain a fit of laughter that was on the verge of boiling over at any second.
“Like I said, Mike and I knew you wouldn’t be into it. We’d like to see if Luscious is up for it, but none of us have her current phone number. You know what she’s up to?” I asked.
“She comes in the store every now and then,” Jon explained. “Always dressed head to toe in black leather. I heard she’s playing a lot of Suzi Quatro tunes and her band is trying to get on the Holiday Inn circuit. Lives down by the river on a boat.”
I had stayed and talked with Jon longer than I intended, but before I left he was willing to go upstairs and check through some store files.