“Fifty bucks an hour,” Jake told them. “We’ll work six days a week, for the most part, with Sundays off, all through the summer. Lunches will be on us. Saturday night beers will be on us as well.”
Ben had no problem accepting the offer. He was free and clear through the summer months. Ted, on the other hand, had a full-time job with Southern Medical Services and would have to put it aside in order to accept the offer. He didn’t agonize over it long. Fifty dollars an hour was nearly four times as much he was making as a medic. He applied for a leave of absence and it was granted. On May 29th, two days after the community college district started its summer break, Ben and Ted both reported for duty. Ted was ten minutes late for his first shift.
“Good morning,” Ben greeted now, as he entered the studio for the day’s work. He was dressed in a pair of blue jeans and a cotton pullover shirt with a picture of a bicycle on it. His hair was shoulder length and he sported a Fu Manchu goatee. He had a dangling earring in his left ear and a wedding ring on his left hand. His wife, Lisa, was a former student of his. She was now in the college’s nursing program and pregnant with their first child.
The group offered their good mornings back to him. He walked over to the rack and pulled down his bass, carrying it over to his chair on the far side of Celia’s position. He began to tune.
“We’re going to be working on The Struggle to start the day,” Celia told him.
“Sounds good,” he said with a nod. He still couldn’t believe he had actually gotten this gig, that he was really playing with Jake Kingsley and Celia Valdez. And though they had already told him they would likely be getting another bass player for the actual recording process, he was hopeful that he could impress them enough that they would keep him on for that stage of the album. True, it would mean he would have to take some sort of leave of absence from the college, but it would be worth it. He would be a recording star! His dream come true! And he could tell by the tunes they were working on that both Jake’s and Celia’s albums had high potential. The music was solid, even if it wasn’t of the genre that each were associated with.
It was ten minutes after nine when the door opened again and Ted Duncan walked in. He had the harried look on his face that was his signature when arriving late for work—which he pretty much did every morning. He was dressed in a pair of khaki cargo pants and sandals, his shirt a faded and tattered souvenir from the 1983 US Festival that was about a size and a half too small for him and served to accent his beer belly in a most unattractive manner.
“Hey, guys,” he greeted, putting the proper tone of apology in his voice. “Sorry I’m late. The damn traffic coming into the valley was pretty bad this morning.”
“Yeah,” Jake grunted. Traffic was Ted’s most frequent excuse for his tardiness, followed a close second by car trouble with his old pickup. No one mentioned that fact that all of them had taken the same route into Santa Clarita from LA proper and had found the traffic to be its normal congested but predictable self. After all, most of the morning commuters were heading into LA, not out of it. “Why don’t you grab your sticks and we’ll get started on the sound check. We’ll be working on The Struggle for the first part of the morning.”
“The Struggle, right,” Ted said, heading over to his drum set. He had a seat and pulled out a pair of sticks from the holder on his bass drum. “Good tune.”
Now that everyone was here and had tuned the instrument he or she was going to be using, they started the ritual of the sound check. Sharon fired up the sound board while Nerdly turned on the speakers and the amps. Everyone plugged in, except for Ted, who played strictly acoustic in the intimate confines of the rehearsal studio (and had to keep his beats somewhat light, at that), and Mary, who played into a microphone set in front of her seat. In deference to everyone’s hearing, the speakers and amps were not set to a performance volume. Instead, they were adjusted to just have enough output so the music could be heard well. Sharon and Nerdly then had everyone play a little piece so the input levels could be adjusted. After this, the vocal mics belonging to Jake and Celia were sound checked as well. Since Jake had convinced the Nerdlys shortly after the acquisition of the rhythm section that perfection was not really needed for this phase of the production, and since they were used to doing this every morning before getting started, the process only took about twenty minutes to accomplish. Five of those minutes were taken up by Ted, who launched into one of his paramedic stories.
“I ever tell you about the time we had this guy with a chain link support pole through his chest?” he suddenly blurted, just as Mary was checking her mic.
“Uh ... no,” Jake said. “I don’t think we heard that one. Maybe after...”
“It was over in The Ranch,” Ted said. “You know, that ritzy-ass section of Pomona near the park? It was on Village Loop, which runs along the green belt there, and the road is kind of winding through these small hills. This college age dude and his girlfriend were flying down that road in the middle of the night—drunk you know—and he lost it on one of the curves. Fuckin’ car went up an embankment and goes airborne—just like something out of goddamn Dukes of Hazzard, I’m telling you—and comes down straddling this chain link fence around a water pump station. They land perfectly parallel with the fence and sever the top support pole with the front end. That broken pole went right through the goddamn windshield and through the chest of the dude driving.” He shook his head. “That was some shit to see.”
“I ... uh ... I bet,” Jake said.
“It killed him?” Cynthia asked, her eyes wide.
“Eventually,” Ted said, “but not right away. He was still talking and screaming when we got there, a goddamn three-inch aluminum pole going in through his sternum and out right between his shoulder blades and then through his seat and into the back seat. He wasn’t even bleeding. His girlfriend—talk about freaking right the fuck out—she didn’t have a scratch on her but we had to transport her for hysteria.”
“I can imagine,” Celia said, both fascinated and appalled.
“So, anyway, we had to get the fire guys to cut that pole down so we could get him out of the car. It was still attached to the fence, you know, and it was sticking through the seats in the rear. They got in there with a power saw and cut both ends. Man, that must’ve hurt like hell. That kid was screaming while they did it, sparks flying everywhere. I had to get in there with him and start a line and light him up with some morphine just to get him through it. And then, once they had him cut free, you could fuckin’ see right through from one end of the pole to the other. It was freaky, dudes. One of the freakiest things I’ve ever seen. You could’ve put a water hose in that thing and it would’ve squirted out the other side.”
Everyone looked at each other for a moment, this image in their heads.
“Once we got him out of there,” Ted continued, “we took him over to the trauma center. He stayed awake through all that. They took him into surgery right away, but once they took that thing out, he crashed and died in about two minutes. The surgeon said his aorta was ripped, along with a couple of the major branches off it. The pole itself was keeping him from bleeding out, but as soon as they removed it: El gusho.”
“Wow,” Jake said after a few moments of horrified silence passed. “That’s ... an interesting story.”
“Quite gruesome,” Mary said. “Whatever in the world prompted you to tell us that?”
“Your violin,” Ted said, pointing at it.
“My violin?”
He nodded solemnly. “Yeah. You see, there was a violin in the car. Apparently, the girlfriend played it. Whenever I see you tuning it up, it always reminds me of that call. I had a therapist tell me once that I should talk about these things instead of obsessing over them.”