But by the end of the third song, he was no longer frightened. By the end of the first set he knew he was home. Years after that first gig, Tell heard a story about Bill Wynian, bassist of The Rolling Stones. According to the story, Wyman actually fell asleep during a performance - not in some tiny club, mind you, but a huge hall-and fell from the stage, breaking his collarbone. Tell supposed lots of people either laughed at that story or assumed Wyman had been on something, but Tell guessed it was true. Bassists, he had discovered, are the invisible men of the rock world. There were exceptions - Paul McCartney, for one - but they only proved the rule.
Perhaps because of the job's very lack of glamor, there was a chronic shortage of bass players. When The Satin Saturns broke up a month later (the lead guitarist and the rhythm guitarist had had a fist-fight), Tell joined a band formed by the Saturns' rhythm man (at their first rehearsal he still had a large purple shiner), and his life's course was chosen, as simply and quietly as that.
Playing in the band, not just at the party but making the party happen-Tell liked that. You were up in front, admired, idolized almost, and yet invisible. Sometimes you had to sing a little back-up, but nobody expected you to make a speech or anything. He lived that life, parttime student and full-time band gypsy, for ten years or so. He drifted into session work in New York, began fooling with the boards, and eventually discovered he was a little better-and even more invisible-on the other side of the glass window. During all that time he had made one good friend: Paul Janning. Nor was Georgie Ronkler so different from him, he realized following what happened on that Friday night.
He and Paul were having a drink or two at one of the back tables in McManus's Pub, talking about the mix, the biz, the Mets, whatever, when all of a sudden Janning's right hand was under the table and gently squeezing Tell's crotch.
Tell moved away so violently that the candle in the center of the table fell over and Janning's glass of wine spilled. A waiter came over and righted the candle before it could scorch the tablecloth. Then he left. Tell stared at Janning, his eyes wide and shocked.
"I'm sorry," Janning said, and he did look sorry ... but he also looked unperturbed.
"Jesus Christ, Paul!" It was all he could think of to say, and it sounded hopelessly inadequate.
"I thought you were ready, that's all," Janning said. "If I hadn't, I suppose I would have been more subtle. It's just that I've wanted you for quite a while now."
"Ready?" Tell repeated. "Ready? What do you mean? Ready for what?"
"To come out. To admit it to yourself and come out."
"I'm not that way," Tell said, but his heart was pounding very fast. Part of it was outrage, part was fear of the implacable certainty he saw in Janning's eyes, most of it was dismay. What Janning had done shut him out. It also shut his mouth, but for the time being that was very much secondary.
"Let's let it go, shall we? Let's just order and make up our minds that it never happened." Until you want it to, those implacable eyes added.
Oh it happened, all right, Tell wanted to say, but that hand-the one that had been there all his life-was across his mouth. Don't say what you shouldn't say, this is a job, a good job, you need that Daltrey tape in your portfolio even more than you need the next two weeks' salary. Be careful, John.
But that wasn't all of it. That was the small of it. The fact was that his mouth closed. It always had. It snapped shut like a bear-trap, a bear-trap with rusty implacable jaws, with all his heart below those interlocked teeth and all his head above. That was the tall of it.
"All right," he said, "it never happened."
Tell slept badly that night, and what sleep he did get was haunted by bad dreams: one of Janning groping him in McManus's was followed by one of the sneakers under the stall door, only in this one Tell opened it and saw Paul Janning sitting there, a corpse with a huge peeling hard-on sticking up from the thatch of his pubic hair like an exclamation point. The mouth of this corpse dropped open with an audible creak. "That's right; I knew you were ready," it said on a puff of greenly rotten air, and Tell woke himself up by tumbling onto the floor in a tangle of coverlet. It was four in the morning. The first touches of light were just creeping through the chinks between the buildings outside his window. He dressed and sat smoking one cigarette after another until it was time to go to work.
Around eleven o'clock on that Saturday-they were working six-day weeks to make Daltrey's deadline-Tell went into the third floor bathroom to urinate. He stood just inside the door, rubbing his temples, and then looked around at the stalls.
He couldn't see. The angle was wrong.
Then never mind! Fuck it! Take your piss and get out of here!
He walked slowly over to one of the urinals and unzipped.
It took a long time to get going.
On his way out he paused again, head cocked, and then walked slowly around into the stall area just far enough so he could see under the door of the first stall.
The dirty white sneakers were still there. The building which used to be known as Music City was almost completely empty, Saturday morning empty, but the sneakers were still there.
Tell's eyes fixed upon a fly just outside the stall. He watched with an empty sort of avidity as it crawled beneath the stall door and onto one of the sneakers. There it stopped, and simply fell dead. It tumbled into the growing pile around the sneakers. Tell saw with no surprise at all (none that he felt, anyway) that among the flies was a large cockroach, lying on its back like a turtle.
He left in large painless strides, and his progress back to the studios seemed most peculiar; it was as if, instead of walking, the building was flowing past him, around him, like river-rapids around a rock.
When I get back I'll tell Paul I don't feel well and take the rest of the day off, he thought, but he wouldn't. Paul had been in an erratic, unpleasant mood all morning, and Tell knew he was part (or maybe all) of the reason why. Might Paul fire him out of spite? A week ago he would have laughed at such an idea. But a week ago he had still believed what he had come to believe in his growing-up: friends were real and ghosts were makebelieve. Did he think the sneakers in the men's room belonged to a ghost? Well, as a matter of fact he did. Which, when taken along with the events of the night before meant he had everything backwards: friends were Make-believe and ghosts were real.
"The prodigal returns," Janning said without looking around as Tell opened the second of the studio's two doors-the one that was called the "dead air" door. "I thought you died in there, Johnny."
"No," Tell said. "Not me."
It was a ghost; Tell found out whose a day before the Daltrey mix-and his association with Paul Janningended, but before that happened a great many other things did. Except they were all the same thing, just little mile-markers, like the ones on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, announcing John Tell's steady progress toward a nervous breakdown. He knew this was happening, understood why it was happening, and still could not help it from happening. It seemed he was not driving this particular road but being chauffeured.
At first his course of action had seemed clear-cut and simple: avoid that men's room, and avoid all questions about the sneakers. Stop thinking about it.
But he couldn't stop thinking about it. It crept up on him at odd moments and pounced like an old grief. He would be sitting home, some stupid game-show on the tube, and think about the flies, or about janitors replacing the toilet paper, and then he would look at the clock and see an hour had passed. Or he would think it was all a malevolent practical joke.