Mike looked up suddenly, toward the street. “You hear a car?”
Nomad listened. “No,” he decided. “She’s not back yet.”
“That girl needs a good girl to look after her,” Mike said. “Drives me crazy sometimes.”
Nomad had finished his cigarette and put it out in the cup, and he wanted to stand and stagger off to get a few hours of sleep before they loaded up to go to El Paso. Their gig wasn’t until Friday night, but they might as well get on the road and have a few days to lie around a pool somewhere. He hoped the T-shirt and CD sales had made them enough money for a friendly neighborhood Motel 6. But he didn’t go, because he felt that Mike still needed him.
“I never thought about playin’ music for a livin’,” Mike went on after a short pause to strain an ear for the car that was not there. “When I was a kid, I wanted to be a vet. I liked animals, I always got along with ’em. But you have to know math, chemistry…all that. I wasn’t smart enough. Even my teachers told me I wasn’t…and then the woman at the library, behind that desk, said…you’re a little boy, you’re not smart enough to read that big ol’ book. She said, go put it on the red shelf over there, and you get yourself a book you can actually read. And then she said… wait a minute, wait a minute…you’re Wayne Davis’s brother, aren’t you? Oh, is that book for him?”
Mike leaned his head forward and closed his eyes for a few seconds, and Nomad again looked away, at some invisible thing in the distance.
“It’s a good word, huh?” Mike asked. When Nomad didn’t respond, Mike said, “Welcome. It’s a good word.”
“Yeah, it is.”
“Good place to start, maybe.” Mike didn’t elaborate on what that meant, and Nomad didn’t want to push him. There was too much pain out here to be pushed.
At last, Nomad said, “I’d better hit it.” He waited for Mike to answer, “Okay,” before he stood up, just as a matter of courtesy.
A few steps toward the house, and Nomad turned back and said, “You don’t have to wait up. You ought to—”
“I’m fine,” came the reply. “Right where I am.”
“’Night, then,” Nomad told him.
“Mornin’,” Mike corrected.
Nomad went up the steps, opened the sliding glass door, entered the house on quiet cat feet and slid the door shut behind him, and in the backyard Mike put the cigarette between his teeth and reached for the notebook and pen.
SEVEN.
Westward went the Scumbucket and its U-Haul trailer, following I-20 across the sunburnt landscape toward El Paso.
Everybody was present and accounted for. A red pickup truck with an International Gay Rodeo Association sticker on the back window had delivered Berke to the house just after seven o’clock. She’d climbed into a sleeping bag and hadn’t budged until ten-thirty, which was why the Scumbucket hadn’t gotten on the highway until noon. But they had plenty of time, it was all good.
“Three hundred eighty-two on YouTube, four hundred and six on MySpace, four hundred and fifty-four on the webpage,” George announced, checking the video hits numbers on his cell. “It’s early, man, still early.” He was glowing today, freshly-showered and wearing his khakis and a crisp lemon-colored short-sleeved shirt. He felt like a million euros. Part of it was that he was so glad and relieved to have told everybody what his future plans were, and that they were past that, no hating going on, no name-calling or spiteful shit. Jeff in Chicago was good with the timeframe, no problem there. The Curtain Club gig had brought in three hundred dollars and change, a pretty decent haul. He felt like he wasn’t leaving them in the lurch; he felt like something solid was in the making, something that was going to take The Five to a new place. The video had been expensive, sure, but he’d heard a lot of comments about it last night, and anything that got people talking was good. Media was the key. Once you got the media interested, that was half the battle right there. Which was why he was okay with them spending money on a few days in a motel in the Paso, because they had an interview set up with the Times on Tuesday afternoon, six minutes on the KTSM morning show on Wednesday, a drop-in visit on KTEP’s local radio talkshow on Wednesday afternoon, and on Thursday afternoon an appearance at Freaky Frontier Comics, Books and CDs on Pebble Hills Boulevard. You had to get the media shine, had to get the people interested and the talk going. So, yeah, he thought he was going to be able to leave them in a better place than when he came aboard, and that was important for him to believe.
Terry was behind the wheel. The iPods and the Gameboys had come out, each to their own to make the time pass. Terry drew George and Nomad into a discussion of which Who rock-opera was better, Tommy or Quadrophenia, with George going for the pinball wizard and Terry and Nomad for Jimmy’s four personalities. Then they curved into talking about famous one-hit wonders, of which Berke thought the most obvious was The Knack and ‘My Sharona’, a song she remembered hearing over and over again at a bowling-alley birthday party when she was ten, about thirteen years after the song was first recorded. They realized they were getting into dangerous country, because Terry had an encylopedic knowledge of old dead bands and at any moment he could set off on a journey across what Berke called the Moldy Territory.
With eyes aflame behind his Lennon specs and passion rising in his voice, Terry would say that for sure bands like Kings Of Leon and Badly Drawn Boy and Band Of Horses were awesome, no doubt, but until you heard the Montells doing ‘You Can’t Make Me’ or the Humans’ ‘Warning’ or ‘Real Fine Lady’ by the Warlords you didn’t know the fire and fever of pure garage rock. You didn’t know what raw power could sound like in music. If you didn’t move to ‘Dinah Wants Religion’ by The Fabs, or ‘L.S.D.’ by the Pretty Things, the coffin lid might as well be closed because you were one dead motherfucker. And then Terry would get onto the subject of “the rock star”, who in his estimation could only be Phil May of the Pretty Things, and to see him in his finest sneering form there was a video of ‘L.S.D.’ on YouTube, the vid faded and gray and old and amateurish, but when Phil May in his striped Mod jacket glances past the camera and swings his long black hair away from his face and seems to chew the words to tatters before he spits them out, you know you have seen The Star.