GAD-GAD-GAD
Sean repeated the chords four times in synch with the guitar and bounced into the hook, but he missed the bridge and Johnny dropped his hands in disgust.
“We’ve been practicing this song over for an hour and you haven't gotten the sequence right once. It's refrain, hook, refrain, hook, refrain, hook, bridge, and hook."
"Something is wrong with me.” With the Hung no one had cared about his timing, but Punk was more exacting than a garage band and Johnny’s patience was running thin.
"Let's give it one more try." Johnny thumbed TAKE ME HIGHER’s bass line and on the count of four Sean hit the opening, then stumbled over the hook and guitarist’s face grew indistinguishable from the frustration the rest of the band had worn throughout the earlier rehearsal. This emergency session was his last chance.
Remembering his mother’s voice, Sean hummed one line, reached the break, and sang the hook aloud. He crooned the second refrain, the hook again, the third refrain, the hook, and flawlessly crossed the bridge into the hook. “Can you take me higher.”
"Holy shit." Johnny eyed Sean. "That wasn't a fluke, was it?"
"No.”
"We can always use another back-up singer." A little encouragement never hurt, although Johnny planned on turning down Sean's mike during rehearsals.
“I might even get my picture on the album sleeve.”
“Don’t push it.” They finished the five songs without a single flub and Johnny was ecstatic. "This breakthrough is a cause for a celebration. If we hurry, we can catch the Heartbreakers’ closing set."
"Tammi expects me to be waiting at the room." Sean enjoyed hearing her footsteps in the corridor and the click of the door latch as much as watching her undressed or sharing a shower in the hall bathroom.
"She won’t get back till 3. You can make it home with plenty of time to spare. Hey, it’s not like the Heartbreakers are living forever." Johnny wasn’t accepting no for an answer.
"Since you put it that way, why not?" Sean rested his bass against the wall.
"You're taking your bass?" Johnny was naked without his instrument.
"I'll give the rock star routine a rest tonight." The girls at Max's were more dedicated to saving the Heartbreakers from self-destruction than seducing a rookie bass with a girlfriend, plus he had a battered Rickenbacker for practice in his room.
"Up to you, my friend." Johnny slung his guitar over his shoulder and and wrapped a black silk scarf around his neck to conceal an eruption of sores. "You ready?"
”Whenever you are.”
The two of them filled their lungs and descended through the stench of the poultry killing fields. Hitting the deserted street, Johnny gasped, "Man, that's getting worse."
"You think one day it might get better.”
“I doubt it.” Something that bad only got worse.
Two Checkers approached, but Sean flagged a new cab off the Manhattan Bridge. Getting in the back, he told the driver, “Union Square.”
"What’s with your grudge against Checkers?"
"I used to drive them in college.” Sean saw the intersection before the Roxbury Projects clearly. “I ran a red light and nearly killed the driver of a Mustang, so I take the other ones now.”
"You graduated from college?"
"In four years." Sean had started as a scholarship math major. Smoking pot in his freshman had ruined his feel for abstract equations and LSD in his sophomore year had erased his ability to consider one plus one a simple equation. “I didn’t do so good.”
“But you finished?”
“By the skin of my teeth.” He had graduated sine laude in 1974.
“Why didn’t you get a real job?”
It was a good question.
“I’m not the type of person to have a real job. A bank interviewer called me a ‘drifter’.”
“You mean like Clint Eastwood ‘drifter’?” The term had all kinds of sexy connotations, but Sean shook his head. “More the ‘Dynamite’ kind of drifter.”
“He was in the Marines thirty years.”
“I could never stick with something that long.”
“Not even a relationship?”
“My longest was five years with my high school sweetheart.”
“Why it end?”
“Because I recognized I would never be able to settle down.”
“Does Tammi know that?”
“It’s not something we discuss, but she’s no fool.” Sean was very uncomfortable with questions he didn’t ask himself. Thankfully the taxi stopped before Max’s and he paid the fare. As they walked to the entrance, Sean said, “Maybe one day I’ll talk to her about it.”
“But not tomorrow.” Johnny was glad Sean wasn’t committed to Tammi. It gave him hope, although the ex-hippie saw it as more as despair. “No not tomorrow.”
They squeezed through the crush at the entrance and the doorman waved them into Max’s. The Heartbreakers were jamming to CHINESE ROCKS and the ex-New York Doll lead guitarist launched into a solo wrenched from the garbage dump of his soul. Dee Dee Ramone’s song about heroin addiction on the Lower East Side was a Punk anthem. The crowd was star-studded. Several waved to him and Sean started feeling good about his life. He had conquered the bass, had money in several banks, lived with Tammi, and was almost grateful to Johnny for persuading him to stay that first night.
As he ordered a beer, a soft hand slipped under his shirt. Supposing it belonged to Tammi, he backed into the inviting belly and a falsetto hissed, "Surprised, big boy?"
"No, I’d recognize that seductive voice in my sleep.”
“You dream about me?”
“No, just what you’d do to me.”
“Oooh, sexy.” Dove dipped her finger beneath his jeans.
“Sorry, I don’t trust myself.” Her fingernails scrapping the top of his pubic hair was a little too tempting for comfort and he pulled out her hand.
“Not many people do.” Most transvestites in Times Square or the 82 Club were hormone-ridden hags, however in bell-bottom pants, a silk shirt unbuttoned to her navel, and a flipped-out shag Dove resembled a lean Farah Fawcett ready to run away from her partners for a long weekend in a cheap hotel.
"You on a date with CHARLIE'S ANGELS fan?"
"He was more Bosley's brother.” Dove knew what straight boys liked and struck a Vogue pose. “Are my clothes a little out of place?"
"People here are too loaded to worry about your style." The girls wore streetwalker hand-me-downs and the boys clad in rumpled jeans and torn t-shirts.
"You care to join them?" Dove dangled a packet of white powder in the air.
"That doesn’t look like sugar."
"It’s a little of this and a little of that.”
“A Speedball by any other name."
"Hmmmm. China white and pink Bolivian is a sure-fire formula to create Queen for a Night.” Dove huffed a fingernail of powder. Viktor was in Brooklyn dropping off fake $20s and Tammi was working the Dollhouse. A rail of dope would lower Sean’s resistance to sex with a woman who was really a man. “How about crowning you King?"
“I’d love to.” His mother had accused him of losing his edge after smoking pot. She had been right, but this scene, the morning rush hour, work, sleep, sports, war, politics, religion, TV, the movies, and music were fueled by drugs, whether it is heroin, cocaine, steroids, pep pills, sedatives, booze, coffee, sugar, or cigarettes. Drugs were a way of life in America and no one was cold-turkeying from the mainstream, for even Billie Graham drank his coffee sweet, but a night with Tammi was more satisfying than any cheap high and he told Dove. "But I’m abstaining these days."
"All the more for me." Dove kissed him on the cheek. "Be seeing you in my dreams."
The band ripped into BORN TO LOSE.
Sean drank his beer, watching Patti Smith, Richard Lloyd from Television, Joey Ramone, Anya Phillips, Xcessive, Legs McNeil, Cheetah Chrome, Judy Nylon, Cookie Mueller, and Maria Duvall unabashedly performed for the reputed movie camera which Andy Warhol had hidden in the ceiling. A redhead from the play WOMEN BEHIND BARS licked her tongue over bruised lips and Sean might have accepted her invitation to the bathroom, if a man hadn’t said, "I'm talking to you."
"Me?" Sean shouted over the slagheap of noise.
"I almost didn’t recognize you without the wig.” The blonde biker from his first night in town shoved him into the bar. “Spotting your fag friend connected him to You."
Sean’s feigning ignorance about that fight was almost the truth, since his memory had been partially erased by Quaaludes. “Sorry, can I buy you a drink?”
"A drink? You busted my nose." The biker jabbed Sean’s chest with his finger and nodded to someone. "Sorry's not gonna cut it. You wanna fight?"
"You mean a duel in Union Square?”
“Duel?”
“Yeah, if I'm not there at dawn, start without me." Sean didn’t have the time for a brawl with a boltneck from New Jersey, but a hard metal object whacked him in the head and a loud ringing in his ears replaced The Heartbreakers. Another blow clouded his eyes with a misty nebula, as the biker launched a sucker punch. He might have broken his jaw, if Dove hadn’t stuck a lit cigarette in his eye.
“Take that, motherfucker.”
The biker screamed with blissless agony and Dove dragged Sean from the bar. He tumbled down the stairs and slumped against the door. The biker was on the top landing, wrestling with the bouncer. Dove lifted Sean to his feet and out onto the street, where she loaded him into a waiting taxi, yelling, "Move it."
"Okay, lady, I'm not deaf. Where to?" the driver asked over a West Coast Ranger’s hockey game. Dove threw ten dollars over the seat. "Just go."
Warm blood dripped red blossoms on Sean’s shirt and the driver expressed his concern by shouting, "Keep that off the seat."
"Just drive." Dove produced a Kleenex from her pocketbook and daubed at Sean’s face. The left side of his face was pocked with small lacerations and he asked, "What he hit me with?"
"A chain wrapped around his fist." Cheri wasn’t fussy about a little mess.
"Damn." An excruciating pain flared within his skull. At least he wasn’t missing any teeth. "Thanks for saving me."
“My pleasure.” Dove stuck a packet under his nose. “How about a pain-killer?”
Mindlessly Sean inhaled the powder. Its bitterness coated his nostril and he snorted another line. An acrid wetness hit the back of his tongue, then a warm heaviness kidnapped his body and he slumped into the seat, hoping no one paid the ransom. Dove wiped away the excess drug. “I’ve been thinking about you. Having you naked. Kissing your lips.”
"That's nice." Sean drifted deeper into the enveloping murk.
"And then doing things a woman could never do.”
"Sounds like a dream.” Sean was too drugged to visualize what Dove had in mind.
"Can I come home with you?" Dove leaned closer to Sean, whose silence was a pleasant change from Viktor’s half-translated horror stories about Brighton Beach.
"Your place?" His eyes rolled into his head, leaving him at Dove's mercy.
"No, yours." Viktor had a terrible habit of appearing at all hours at the Grammercy Park Hotel.
"Why not? The Terminal Hotel. West Street. Room 301."
“Tammi won’t mind?”
“Tammi thinks you’re great.”
"Then this will be a night you won't forget." Dove kissed him on the neck and told the driver. “The Terminal Hotel."
"You’re the boss, lady."
Stroking his arm Dove pretended that Sean was her boyfriend. As a prisoner in a man's body she was a master at self-delusion. Unfortunately when the taxi reached Jane Street, Sean was breathing shallow and she lifted his eyelids. His pupils were blind to the light and Dove swore, "Shit."
"Problem?" the driver asked, shutting off the meter.
"He had a little too much to drink." Dove couldn’t dump him in the street. "Driver, mind helping me with lover boy?"
"For an extra $10, sure.” The driver turned off the engine.
“$5.”
“It’s a deal.”
Inside the hotel the two struggled with the legless occupant of room 301. Their furtive exit two minutes later suited Ernie, for the clerk avoided problems after midnight. Concentrating on the NY Times Crossword puzzle, he forgot them their coming and going and that small gift of ignorance was his best guarantee that tomorrow would be just another day to forget even if the occupant of #301 didn’t make it through the night.
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