“It was Mrs. Kelton,” I replied. “She bitched her own play. She may have read about dry ice somewhere, but she’d obviously never handled any of it before. Like I said, that stuff is seriously cold! Remember those funny-looking burns you treated on her hand?”
“Yeah?”
“They weren’t burns. Since you’ve done all of your docing out here, it’s not surprising you wouldn’t recognize them for what they were. But I did. I spent a winter on the line in Korea and, man, I got real familiar with it.
“I had to wonder, just how in the heck does anybody pick up a case of frostbite in the middle of the Mojave Desert?”
Comeback
by Ed Gorman
Ed Gorman’s March 1996 EQMM story “Out There in the Darkness” was later expanded by the author into a novel entitled The Poker Club, and will soon be released as a motion picture under the same title. Also coming out soon is a new Gorman novel, The Midnight Room. The following story will appear, at around the same time this issue goes on sale, in an anthology celebrating the work of author and screen writer Richard Matheson entitled He Is Legend.
The morning of the birthday bash this dude with hair plugs and a black camel’s hair coat and the imperious air only a big-time businessman exudes walks into Guitar City and starts looking around at all the instruments and amps.
A tourist. Most places you see a guy who looks like this you automatically think this is the ideal customer. But in the business of selling high-end guitars and amps you don’t want somebody who looks like he just drove over from the brokerage house in his Mercedes but will only spend a few hundred on his kid.
Some of my best sales have gone to guys who look like street trash. They know music.
I wandered over to him. I assumed he didn’t know what he was holding. The Gibson Custom Shop ’59 Les Paul cost a few thousand more than I make a month — and I do all right.
When he glanced up and saw me, he said, “Hey, you’re the guy I saw on the news this morning.”
I smiled. “My fifteen minutes finally arrived.”
“Well, you’re going to the big party and everything. Sounds like you’ll have some night. Nice that you all still get along.”
John Temple had returned to Chicago on the occasion of his thirtieth birthday. This was at the end of his worldwide tour and his latest CD going double platinum. Some of the friends he’d met while on tour were flying in for the occasion. Names people around the world would recognize. “Too bad you had that falling-out with Temple, you and — What’s the other guy’s name?”
“McMurtin.”
“Right. Temple, McMurtin, and you. You’re Rafferty, right?”
“Right.”
“And you and McMurtin — went off on your own.”
He was polite enough not to finish the rest. The well-known tale of how John Temple decided four years ago that it was time he took his wounded voice out for a test run all by itself. Two double-platinum CDs later, Temple was returning home for a press orgy of adulation.
I was working here at Guitar City. Pete McMurtin was one of the ghosts you saw standing on the sidewalk outside rehab houses shakily smoking his cigarette.
Even though he’d brought up an unpleasant subject, he redeemed himself by saying, “My son’s graduating from Northwestern. He’s very serious about his little band. I was hoping he’d grow out of it by now, but no such luck. He’s coming into the firm but he also plans to keep playing on weekends. So I want something really special.”
“Well, this is really special.”
“Oh? What is it?”
I told him.
“So this is really upscale, huh?”
I smiled at his word. “Very upscale.”
“And he’ll need an amp. A good one.”
“A good one or a great one?”
“What’s a great one?”
“Well, you’ve got a great guitar so I’d go with a great amp — a Marshall. The Jimi Hendrix Reissue. Stack.”
He grinned. “This could all very well be bullshit.”
I grinned back. I knew he was going to go for it. “It could very well be. But it isn’t.”
“Well, I guess you know what you’re talking about. This is your fifteen minutes, after all.” He meant well but it was still painful. “So my son will know what this is and he’ll like it?”
“He’ll love it. He’ll think you’re the best old man a kid could have.”
A hint of pain in his eyes now. Maybe this present wasn’t just for graduation. Maybe this was a guilt present of some kind. “Then let’s do it.”
On my lunch hour I drove over to the facility where Pete was staying. I’d talked to the woman in charge. Natalie was her name. She said that Pete was showing some progress with his cocaine problem and that she was afraid of what might happen if he went to the party. I’d convinced her that I would take care of him. I reminded her that he listed me as his only friend. After his years of living in a coke dream, his family had bid him goodbye.
At one time, the Victorian house had been fashionable. Easy to imagine Packards pulling up in the driveway and dispatching men in top hats and mink-wrapped women laughing their way to the front door fashionably late for the party.
Now the house was a grim gray and the cars were those dying metal beasts that crawl and shake from one traffic light to another.
Natalie Evans answered the door herself. The odors made me wince even before I crossed the threshold. All the friends I’ve had in places like this — bad food, disinfectant, old clothes, old furniture, old lives — despite what the calendar says.
“He’s in the parlor. He got up and worked for three hours this morning helping to clean out the garage. I’m really hoping he can keep going this way. That’s why I’m nervous about tonight.”
Natalie was one of those sturdy women who know how to run just about anything you care to name. Competence in the blue eyes. Compassion in the gentle voice. She was probably just a few years older than me but she was already a real adult, something I’d probably never be.
I’d seen Pete only two weeks ago, but for an unexpected moment there I didn’t recognize the fragile but still handsome twenty-nine-year-old who sat deep in the stained arms of a busted-up couch. The smile was still there, though. John had the voice, I had the licks on the guitar. But Pete had the classic good looks of old Hollywood. Pete had been a heartbreaker since the three of us started Catholic school together in the first grade. He played a nice rhythm guitar, too.
“Hey,” he said. I could see that he was thinking of standing up but decided against it. His three hours of work had apparently exhausted him.
The parlor was a receptacle for stacks of worn-out records, worn-out CDs, worn-out videotapes, worn-out paperbacks, worn-out people. An old color TV played silently, a pair of hefty cats yawned at me, and an open box of Ritz crackers and a cylinder of Cheez Whiz had to be moved before I could sit on the wooden chair facing him. Junkies and junk food.
“I don’t know, Michael.”
He didn’t need to say any more. The apprehension, the weariness in those four words meant that I’d done the right thing by checking in with him before tonight.
“I talked to God, Pete.”
He smiled again. We’d been kidding each other since we were six years old. We knew the rhythms and patterns of our words. “Yeah, and what did God have to say?”
“He said he was going to be muy pissed if you didn’t go.”
“God speaks Spanish?”