A few minutes before he’d spoken, there’d been a quick check of the wristwatch.
No, Dad, Johnny had said, as he’d sat on the edge of the bed and put on his shoes. I don’t mind.
But when the son had turned to look at his father, on his way out the door to a room down the hall, both of them knew what they were looking at.
Dad? John had asked. Don’t you love Mom anymore?
Are you kiddin’? came the answer, with a quick harsh laugh. ’Course I love your mother! Know why I love her so much? ’Cause she gave you to me, that’s why. Us two men, on the road. Freedom and music, what could be better? Hey, you go tell Danny I said you guys call out for pizzas. ’Kay?
Okay, Dad, the son had said, because Dean Charles was the light of his world and for years now in that little house in East Detroit, between Center Line and Roseville, Michelle Charles had been sitting on the living-room floor surrounded by her many Bibles and religious pamphlets, her brow furrowed in concentrated study, her eyes moving desperately from line to line to find something she could believe in, for she had discovered the letters in her husband’s shoebox.
But like Butch Munger’s girlfriend after he’d beaten her half-dead, Nomad thought as he waited for service, Michelle Charles was loyal and faithful and true and what was a woman like that doing with Dean-a-rino? Giving him space, Nomad mused. Letting him wander, knowing he would always come back home, if just to restring his guitar.
His mother was okay now. She lived in an apartment near her sister’s family in Sanford, Florida, and she worked in hospice care and had taken up tennis with a group of friends. She didn’t mind telling them her son was a “rock’n rolla”. Life, like the show, must go on.
Suddenly there was a waitress standing next to his booth, watching him think. He realized she wasn’t the same waitress he’d seen at the kitchen door, because that one was pouring iced tea for the middle-aged man.
“Um… I’d like a cup of coffee, please,” he told her. “Just black.”
“Is that all you want?” She was about forty or so, on the short side, had dark hair and dark eyes and she looked either very tired or supremely bored, as if she wanted to be anywhere on earth but the Argonaut at about three-thirty in the morning.
“No, I’d like the steak sandwich special.”
She didn’t write it down. “Steamed vegetables, Greek potatoes, or au gratin potatoes?”
“The Greek.” He felt he had to say the next thing, because the first time he’d ever come in here and ordered those they’d been way too oily, and because the waitress turnover was high, almost everytime he came in he had to say the same thing. “Can you ask the cook to hold back on the oil?”
“He just makes ’em one way,” she said.
“Yeah, but…you know… I’ve had them before and there was too much oil, so—”
“He just makes ’em one way,” she said, and this time there was a grim belligerence in her voice that made Nomad set his mouth in a hard line and stare up at her.
“Hey,” he told her, “trust your cook, okay?” He tried to smile but it wouldn’t happen. “He’ll get it right, if you ask him. Just trust your cook.”
She was silent for a few seconds, her mouth partly open. Her face was an expressionless mask, her eyes two small bits of unshining coal. “I’ll ask him,” she said tightly. “I know what I’m doing. I’m telling you he only makes ’em one way.”
“Alright, thanks,” Nomad said.
She said, “No problem,” as she was turning away from him, and he felt the hair on the back of his neck stir as if from a hot breeze.
OhmyGawd, Nomad thought when she had gone. Shimatta! What a bitch! Whatever was going on with her, he hoped she didn’t spit in his coffee before she brought it to him. His heart was beating a little hard. He thought he could write a song about this. A ballad, maybe. Right. Call it ‘The Ballad of the Greek Potatoes’.
First verse: He stumbled in for want of food,
And found a waitress fucked-up and rude.
A steak sandwich, he asked for, and potatoes Greek.
She glared at him like he was a two-headed freak.
Or something like that.
Here she came again, bringing him a cup of coffee. He noted she didn’t make eye-contact with him. The cup was banged down, and some sloshed over onto the table. But then she’d turned around again and headed into the kitchen, and Nomad thought,
He asked the waitress to trust her cook,
And got for his trouble a dirty look.
This used to be a place he liked to go,
But now the service in this fucking joint doth blow.
Well, the meter was screwed up, but it got the point across.
He would eat his food, call a cab and get out. Simple enough. He stared again at the lump of crystal. Something to believe in, he thought.
He used to believe he was going somewhere in this business. He used to believe that one day all his dues would be paid. That he would come up with the Right Song, at the Right Time. With the Right Band, of course. He’d thought—believed, wished, whatever—that The Five was the Right Band. That in The Five the talents and the personalities and the desires meshed, as much as they could in any band. Were they perfect? No. Was The Five perfect, as a band? Absolutely not. But they had tried, so so hard…
He remembered what Felix Gogo had said, and it was the bitter truth: Talent’s a piss-poor third to ambition, and ambition is second to personality.
And add these necessary ingredients: connections and luck. But even with all those things combined, something could still go horribly wrong.
He imagined a splitting of himself, a division between the Nomad and the John Charles. In his imagination the John Charles stood up from the Nomad and sat down on the other side of the booth.
“A shitty, shitty deal,” John Charles said. “You know what I’m talking about.”
“Yeah,” Nomad said in his mind, to his mental boothmate. He was talking about the new music the Austin band Ezra’s Jawbone had finished back in February. Nomad was friends with both the lead singer and the keyboard player, who also wrote all their songs. They had wrapped up a project they called Dustin Daye, had given him a copy of the test CD to hear and then sent the package off to their label, MTBF Records. Dustin Daye had been a rock opera, about a young man who suddenly awakens in a hotel room in an unknown city and has no idea who he is or where he’s come from. As the music progresses, the idea is raised that Dustin Daye, who gets his name from the faint impression of a signature on a notepad in his room, might be the Second Coming or he might be the Devil in human flesh, and even he doesn’t know which one, but someone out there—or more than one person—is trying to kill him before he can accomplish what he feels he has to do, which he doesn’t know will ultimately be for Good or for Evil. Or is he just an escaped lunatic? Nomad wasn’t religious, but he understood the light versus dark concept. It was in all the best horror movies.
“That’s some awesome music,” John Charles said, and Nomad had to agree. The fifteen songs, two nearing the seven-minute mark and one up there over ten minutes, were absolutely mindblowing. They flowed from and into each other, they went in unexpected and amazing directions, the arrangements and vocals were off the hook and there were mid-song key and tempo changes that should never have worked but to Nomad sounded like some of the freshest, most vibrant music he’d ever heard. Plus it had a last song, ‘The Last Song’, that made Nomad lie awake at night hearing it over and over in his head and thinking this was going to be a huge breakthrough biggie for Ezra’s Jawbone.