“See this, this is the sickest tube compressor on the market.”
“Oh? What’s it do?” I’d ask as he tore away the bubble wrap and exposed another rack-mountable steel box with a face that lit up, dials, gauges, and a needle that’d jump around and measure something.
“This powers the mic, makes kick drums sound big and monstrous … just sick.”
“Oh. We just got done recording the drums,” Seth would say, hurt.
“Damn…” Mike would take off his Gilligan hat and scratch his head by his long black ponytail. “Yeah, that’s pretty rude of me. You guys wanna re-record the drums?”
When we would re-record the drum tracks, another cardboard box would appear.
“What’s that?”
“Oh, this is the sickest mic…” He’d look at us embarrassed. “It’s awesome for snare drums, so … shit. Let’s re-re-record the drums.”
His wife left. His hobby used to be his motorcycle, their annual trip down to Sturgis. His ATV. He used to have a boat that he went out fishing on. When she left him, all that stuff got sold, and she got half the money. He took the other half and invested in studio equipment that was as long gone as his wife was. Sometimes he would get a glassy look in his eyes after a few beers and say, “I wonder where my Fender reverb tank wound up? That thing was cherry.”
He’d point at his digital rack mount and say, “I thought digital was the way to go. I was mistaken.”
The next time I’d come to the studio, the rack mount reverb unit would be gone and there would be a massive Fender reverb tank the size of a small television. “See that,” he’d beam with pride. “That sucker is even better than the first one I had.”
Mike was a little punchy. He had a lazy eye. He explained that it was better that his wife had left and taken the motorcycle and particularly his ATV, because he’d crashed it into a pine tree out in the sand pits and nearly split his head open.
“I was a different person then. I used to drink way too much. Now I’m glad I have the studio to keep me occupied.”
We’d hear footsteps above us in the house sometimes. No-one was there, but we swore we heard them. Mike said his house was haunted. He claimed he saw ghosts sometimes.
“They’re hot, too. Big tits,” he’d say as he snickered, dozing off on the couch with tropical flowers and exposed springs.
Another cardboard box appeared at the door.
“What’s that?”
“Nothing,” he said, leaving it sealed. “Let’s pretend we’re the happiest and most fulfilled we can ever get.”
7
The rock quarry was dead. That made me happy. After I pulled the F-250 onto the scale to get an ‘empty,’ I peered through the glare on the glass of the weigh trailer at the silhouette of Steph. She waved me on with an exaggerated motion as if landing a jet. I parked the truck, went into her trailer.
Steph was sitting behind the register. Wayfarers with orange lenses held her hair back out of her shadowy eyes.
“How you doing?” I asked, leaning on the counter. I wasn’t really looking for an answer, just saying what you’re supposed to say.
“What’re you getting,” she said with disinterest.
Steph was impatient. She was through with all my bullshit. She looked down at the counter and jotted down some inconsequential numbers. She was still mad at me. It was a real inconvenience that I had to come there two or three times a week, real inconvenient that she never wanted to be bothered by me again. We had history.
“I need Dale on the machine,” I said.
“They all say that,” she said. “Show some originality.”
This was a new development; she was cracking a joke. Good. It’d been long enough.
“Moss Rock?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
It was my usual routine, buying boulders to build walls or waterfalls. In this case, the job at hand was a rock wall at an estate on the ocean not far from Ethan’s place. I cracked my knuckles. Steph stopped slouching.
She glared at me, “You gotta shave. You look like shit.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Suits me fine for right now.”
For somebody who was only five foot one, she seemed fifty feet tall at that moment.
She didn’t smile at me. I was used to it. I left the weigh house trailer. The door slammed behind me on its own. I drove my truck through the quarry, stirring dry caked dust as I passed the many assorted pallets of flagstone wrapped in chicken wire. I passed between the jack pine, that hung low with heavy cones, and crossed over the copper-colored creek, stained that way by cedar trees and spanned by a small stainless steel bridge, I came into the open pit where the mountainous piles of stone were: blue chip, honey beige, Delaware river stone, the same sharp red rocks from the Lagoon House yard. The sky opened up in there, blue and expansive. Clouds zipped by as if riding a conveyer belt. The space was circular, and the outer fringes were lined by a thick wall of pine and cedar. Past the loose pebbles piles, but contained by the pines, were slabs of heavier rock broken off of mountains that existed far away from the flat, wet coastline of New Jersey.
I found Dale asleep in the 5-ton, rusted-out Kubota bulldozer. The bucket was almost big enough to drive my truck into.
I woke him up by laying on the horn.
“There you are,” Dale said, grinning. He wore a cut off white t-shirt, from the junkyard where he and I worked briefly many moons before, and a backwards Yankees cap. Once he saw me, he reached instantly for a joint and started to fish around for the harder to find commodity, his lighter.
He looked at me for help.
“I don’t smoke,” I said, meaning I would but that I couldn’t help him light up. He cursed me, sliding the joint behind his ear. He knew from past experience that the cigarette lighter in my truck was shot.
“I need 2 tons of moss rock.” I pointed at the pile in the corner. It was hunks of mountain snapped off. Moss, lichens, and roots all stuck to it.
“Bro, not so quick. I’m on break.”
“It’s 8 a.m.”
“I wanna hear what happened between you and Steph.”
“Oh come on, let it go.”
“She hates your guts,” he said.
“There was a little misunderstanding. So we stopped seeing each other.”
“Like what?” he asked, spinning his hat forward. “Spill it. She won’t give me the time of day ‘cause of something between you two. I’ve got the bad luck of being your friend. What is it?”
“Well,” I said, “really it’s ancient history, and it’s none of your business.”
He laughed. Just then, another truck came over the little metal bridge. He waved it over. The guy looked like a hick farmer. He wanted a load of river pebbles, the kind that are abundant and free anywhere there are mountains and a river. Ha. But we paid fifty dollars a ton in Jersey. Dale pointed at me.
“He’s first, but you got a light?”
The farmer guy passed a nickel zippo, and Dale lit the joint. The guy took the lighter back and drove the rack body back by the bridge. There he waited.
Dale took a hit, exhaled. “What’d you do to that pretty little thing to make her so jaded?”
“Steph? I saw her online when she was seventeen — her profile, ya know. I waited till her eighteenth birthday to message her. I was 22.”
“Sure, you waited. An absolute gentleman. So you took her out?” He passed me the joint.
“Yeah, a few times. We got into it right away too.”
“She’s a slut?” he asked, perplexed. “Doesn’t seem it.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “No, she’s not a slut. Not by a long stretch. She was real into me. We used to screw around in her room, and she still had stuffed animals on her bed from when she was a little girl. It was kinda sick.”