According to Terry.
As the Scumbucket rumbled on and the air-conditioning hacked and wheezed, the highway speared straight between land colored both yellow and brown, with occasional stands of trees holding onto their faded green like desperate misers onto money, surrounded by thorn-bushes and waist-high scrub and dirt as dry as gunpowder. They passed Abilene around two-thirty. Ahead of them heatwaves shimmered and the pavement glistened like gray liquid.
“Weird bands,” the Little Genius said, introducing another round of debate.
They came up with several. Uncle Fucker, described as “psychobilly country music on crystal meth”, was Nomad’s pick. Ariel said she’d seen A Band Of Orcs play in San Francisco; they were a heavy-metal band who dressed as Lord Of The Rings-style orcs, complete with battle armor and fearsome makeup. George said he thought ArnoCorps was pretty weird; they mostly did songs based on Schwartzenegger action movies, and they dressed the part. Berke mentioned Empire Of The Sun, with their off-the-wall costumes and strange but compelling electropop warblings. Mike had his eyes closed listening to his iPod, so he had no opinion.
“The 13th Floors,” Terry said.
“We’re not talking about prehistoric,” George reminded him. “Current bands only.”
“Don’t care. The 13th Floors. And I’ll say that the 13th Floors could blow us and every band we ever heard of off any stage anywhere.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Berke said. “Moldy Territory-time.”
“Maybe.” Terry glanced back at her in the rearview mirror. “But show me another band who actually created their own instruments. Show me another band who came up with such awesome sounds. And then they wrote songs from them that no other band in the world could’ve written. Show me—”
“Show me any remaining remnant of the 13th Floors,” George interrupted, “except some warped LP in a collector’s storeroom. Maybe they’re legends, but those guys are long gone. How about we keep the discussion to working bands?”
Terry didn’t reply for a few seconds. Then he asked Nomad, who sat shotgun, “Would you hold the wheel a minute?” When Nomad did, Terry dug the wallet from the back pocket of his jeans. “You guys know the name Eric Gherosimini?”
“Sure,” George answered. “He was the keyboard player and front man. Flying high on acid all the time, wasn’t he? And he vanished after the band split in… I don’t know the year.”
“1968,” Terry said. “November.” He brought a many-times-folded piece of paper from his wallet, passed it back to George and then took the wheel again. “You want to read that out loud?”
As the others looked on, and even Mike opened his eyes because he sensed he was missing out on something, George quickly scanned the paper. “Shit,” he said quietly. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Read it.”
“Terry,” George read, “I don’t have a computer out here but I went to the library in town. I looked up your band and I watched your videos. I found a CD in a store. There’s some groovy keyboard shit on it. If you went to all the hassle to find me, and you want to hear her so bad, come see me. Not the best host, I can’t put you up, but I’m working on something real. Like you to hear some of it, get a young ear. If you’re coming from Albuquerque, follow 66 west for thirty-two miles, you’ll see a road on the right with a sign to—” He blinked and looked up. “These are directions to Eric Gherosimini’s house?”
“You got it. He signed at the bottom, didn’t he?”
“I’m not following this,” Ariel said. “Who are we talking about?”
“The 13th Floors were—” George began, but Terry stepped on him: “I’ll tell it.”
Terry reached a hand back and waited for George to return the letter. Then he said, “The 13th Floors were together from 1965 to 1968. They did three LPs on the Polydor label and had a couple of singles that sold okay but didn’t set the world on fire. If you can find those LPs now, and they’re in good shape, you could make a lot of money. The 13th Floors did experimental rock, acid rock I guess you’d call it. They used weird effects, wrote off-the-wall lyrics and they made instruments out of things like gourds and metal pipes. Eric Gherosimini played a Rhodes piano, a Vox organ and a Mellotron, and he was always tinkering with them, taking them apart, rebuilding them, putting them together with parts from other keyboards. But George is right…the band played stoned most of the time. They were heavy acid hitters. It got to where they were hard to work with. They dropped gigs left and right. Their drummer jumped out the window of a Holiday Inn in Bathesda, Maryland—”
“Go, drummer!” said Berke, with a fist pump.
“—and he landed on a woman in the swimming pool and broke her back, and that was about the end of their road. They split and just merged with the giant whirlpool, man. Just got sucked down the drain, and gone.” Terry shrugged. “But their stuff started showing up as samples in the ’80s. Record collectors shot their LP prices up. A few critics who’d never heard of them got interested, and all of a sudden they were ranked with Procul Harum, Cream, The Doors…bands like those. Only stranger. Somebody found a fragment of a home movie in color of them doing a gig in Oakland in ’68, a couple of months before the breakup…and on it, Eric Gherosimini was playing a white keyboard that nobody could identify. Vox? No. Rhodes? Mellotron? No. Too bad the fragment had no sound. But I think it must have been a keyboard he’d built from pieces of other instruments. I’d heard about it, it was kind of a rumor that floated in and out among the LP collectors. The keyboard was never on any record, there’s no evidence it was ever used in any gig other than Oakland. But he had a name for it. Or, a name for ‘her’, I mean. Lady Frankenstein.”
“Wait a minute, hold on!” George said. “If this is really the guy, how’d you find him?”
“Last year I was talking with one of my piano students at the Episcopal Center. We were just shooting the bull, and we started talking about old bands. This guy’s only twenty, but he knows his retro. So he asks if I’ve ever heard of this band and that band…and I say yeah, yeah, and then he hits me with the fact that his grandfather was a roadie out on the West Coast in the mid- to late-sixties, that’s how he got his interest. Then he hits me with the fact that Grandpa was not only a roadie, but was selling magic mushrooms, hash, acid and whatever to the bands he was working with. This dude was like…their Doctor Feelgood, man. So Grandson says Grandpa got busted in ’67 getting high with a guy named Nate Cleave, that they were good buddies and they still kept in touch.” Terry saw by the gas gauge that they’d better start looking for a station, because the needle hovered just above the E.
“Nate Cleave was the bass player for the 13th Floors,” Terry continued. “Now he’s Dr. Nathan Cleave, a professor of Astronomy at the University of Florida. I didn’t find that out until later, but I figured I could start with Grandpa. I pleaded my case with Cleave, told him why I was so interested, and he said he knew where Eric Gherosimini was but the dude was a hermit, he didn’t want visitors. Didn’t have the Internet, didn’t have a cellphone. Finally he said he’d write him for me. Snail mail, to a post office box. It took a few months, but back in May I got that letter. Inviting me to come see him. Me.” Some emotion got in his throat and tightened it up. “Man, this is like the Holy Grail to a keyboard player. One of the greatest acid rock keyboard players ever is inviting me to come see an instrument he created. It’s like…the legend of legends. That’s why I’ve got to go. I’ve got to go see it for myself.”