Descent into Hades: Part 3
As I mentioned before, I had been a working musician since the age of 14. With this band, we had practiced for months but I guess it took standing on stage in a dingy hole next to a viaduct to realize how bad we were. We played mostly slow songs like The Key’s In The Mailbox and Today I Started Loving You Again. Dale, Leigh and I took turns singing. Occasionally a couple got up and danced. In between songs, Dale tuned his guitar. All guitar players do a lot of tuning, but Dale had honed it into a performance. Between nearly every song, he’d lean his head down, ear to the guitar and tune and we’d listen to the b string bend up, then down, then up. By the second set I figured out what he was really doing. He was posturing for the women. He knew he had a trim, muscular body that women loved. He knew he was good looking. Christ, he must have spent hours in front of the mirror with his guitar perfecting his “tuning” pose! It might have been impressive to the women but any musician in the audience knew that Dale didn’t have a clue about guitar tuning, “Dale, we need to keep things moving a little faster,” I said, halfway through the night. “Can’t keep my damned guitar in tune,” he said, hunched over. “Hey!” I turned to the woman standing in front of the stage. “Yes . . . uh, yeah,” I said, correcting myself. I really had to watch my language. If I did something stupid like use a three syllable word, or a formal yes in a land where the word doesn’t exist, my cover would be blown. I was harboring a secret that could never, ever get out. I worked at a college. These people would accept me if I were a coke addict, or an ex-con. They would accept me if I was a cross dresser. But if they knew I worked at a college their trust in me would be gone forever. They would shun me, wondering what a “fancy college guy” was doing in their world. At the same time, I never let my colleagues know where I was playing because they just wouldn’t understand. For the most part, college faculty are made up of people who have gone straight from high school through their PhD programs and don’t have a clue what’s in the world outside academia. The ones who do see the poor are seeing them through the sugar-sprinkled lense of a research project. And even those people never see the Erie Houses of the World. If a college professor (at least 99 percent of them) ever stepped into an Erie House, he would crap his pants with loathing, disgust . . .and fear. * “Hey, you guys sound okay but could you step it up a little?” The woman, in her 20s, held a cigarette in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other. She wasn’t old enough to have the sagging face and tired eyes of the other women who lived their nights in these places. But she would acquire the features in just a few short years. “Step it up?” “Yeah, like some rock ‘n roll!” She put the bottle to her lips, tipped it straight up, gulped twice and brought it down. “Rock ‘n roll!” She said louder. The phrase struck a primeval chord in her. I could see it rushing into her genes and swirling throughout her body. She swelled with the power and she turned to the room. “Fuckin’ rock ‘n roll!” She yelled. A few other women yelled back. “Rock ‘n roll!” “Fuckin’ rock ‘n roll!” Apparently this was a girl thing. The men sat back with their beers, watching to see what we would do. The women were their front line, their scouts, their challengers. If we didn’t react the right way, a guy would come up to the stage and say in a territorial, mocking, testosterone challenging tone, “The women want some rock ‘n roll. Ain’t ya gonna play any?” The reply at this point is all-important. You don’t say, “We have our play list, so live with it.” You don’t say, “Your friend is drunk and loud.” The first will get you fired and the second will get you beat up in the alley on your first break. You tell the fellow with the beer in his left hand, a cigarette in his right hand and a knife in his pocket that you’ll work his request in. That way he can go back to his girl and say he took care of things. The way of the world basically . . . carnal. Joe wants his lady to drink and have a good time so he can have sex later. If she’s pissed and drunk, it’s not going to happen. When it gets down to the basics, the world is really too simple. The yelling was getting louder and nearly out of hand. I turned to Leigh and Dale. “Johnny B. Goode.” I turned back to Hal. “Johnny B. Goode.” The trick was to make them happy before they got too drunk and belligerent. From the torn wallpaper to the hardwood floor pocked with knife nicks, the place had seen a lot of belligerence. Lights were kept low so the blood stains here and there weren’t so obvious. We slammed into the “Johnny B. Goode” and the floor filled. We played the last verse twice to extend the song. When we finished, there was scattered applause and the appeased crowd broke up and returned to their beer and whiskey. When you’re on stage, you see everything and everyone in a room. You become adept at reading a crowd -- and every crowd has its own personality. This crowd was easy: they wanted to drink and be entertained. They weren’t fussy about the quality of their drinks or entertainment. But they needed both. The men expected sex either during the evening or shortly after leaving. The women were looking for a companion, someone who wouldn’t hurt them and would be warm sleeping next to them. The sex was part of the bargain. What the hell, 10 minutes worth of activity buys a companion for the night. Cheap trade. * It wasn’t until after the first set that I noticed two young women to our right. The heavy set one had her back to us. The other, a lean, sad-eyed brunette was pretty, bordering on lovely. She watched us. After awhile I noticed she wasn’t as interested in the band as she was in Dale. In fact, she was totally infatuated. Christ, maybe this guitar tuning performance worked! We moved into the next song, a cover of the Everly Brothers “Dream Dream Dream” which Leigh and I did as a duet. To us, it was a song. To these two girls, the sad-eyed pretty one and the plump woman with zits and frizzled hair, and the pretty one, the song was all too real. Our first night at the Erie House was the first chapter in a long tale of illicit love, criminal activity and, of course, violence.
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