FAREWELL GHOST Read online

  Clay shifted behind the gate to watch her, bracelets clacking, heading for the black punch-drunk van that had delivered her here. They were walking single-file, and the likeness between them and Rocket Throne’s iconic album art wasn’t lost on their voyeur: Two guys and a girl, their clothing, attitude, the shadows reaching out toward the Hopperian darkness beyond the pool of streetlight. Were they doing it on purpose? Would he ever see them again to find out?

  “Hey!” Clay called, before he knew what he was doing.

  And the spike-haired one jumped a foot off the ground.

  The guy with the beard caught sight of Clay’s shadow at the gate and flinched. “Shit!”

  The girl barely moved. Just pivoted toward Clay’s voice. Her eyes found and locked on his. “Hey yourself,” she called back.

  For a second, Clay had the urge to pull a Boo Radley and bolt. He gripped the wrought iron, willing himself to stay. “I just moved in,” he managed.

  The girl’s boots clomped the blacktop as she closed in. Her companions trailed behind, naturally conceding to her leadership. She was about Clay’s age, which was to say a few years out of high school, but still young enough to be mistaken for a college student at places that offered student discounts. “We knew Dave Ganek,” she told him.

  “He came by our shop a lot,” Beard added. “He was friendly about everything ’cept giving us a tour of the property.” His sly eyes ran from the girl back to Clay. “How about you?”

  “Oh, um…” Smitten as he was, Clay wasn’t letting strangers in in the dead of night. “I don’t have the remote for the gate right now.”

  “Got it,” Beard shot back. “You want to, but you just can’t.” He started to leave, but the girl collared him.

  “Don’t be a dick. He doesn’t know us and we’re creeping around his property.” She offered Clay a smile that turned his legs to jelly. “You’re new to the 818, huh?”

  “I grew up in Philly. I’m Clay. Um, Harper.”

  “I’m Savy.” She stuck her hand through the gate.

  Clay squeezed the soft flesh, warm at the palm, cool along the back of her hand. “You are?” “Short for Savannah. The tatted-up cat over here goes by Spider and this rude, bearded mother answers to Joe Belasco. ‘Fiasco’ Joe Belasco to his very few friends.”

  “Don’t ask us if we’re a band,” Fiasco said. “We’re not.”

  “For the record, though, we totally are,” Spider said.

  “Cool. What do you call yourselves?”

  Fiasco Joe offered Clay a shadowy sneer. “The Quiet Desperations of Calcut—”

  “Currently between names,” Savy said. “Do you play?”

  “A little guitar…” Clay replied, and thankfully stopped himself before, Six hours, minimum, every single day. But not before he could babble: “…and some vocals. But nothing professional. Just, you know, shower performances.”

  At this point, Clay realized he was still shaking Savy’s hand and released her. Her stare kept on him. What she saw—close-set eyes, ski-jump nose, skinny arms, hair too thick and cowlicked to ever be shaped into something cool—couldn’t have inspired her. “We should jam some time.”

  Clay nodded emphatically. And he knew what she was doing, buttering him up, shining him on so he’d give them a tour of the house, but who cared? What few friends he had in this life now lived a continent away. There was no one in his immediate orbit except his father, and his father was starting a new job in the morning and would be gone more times than not. So Clay pressed his face a little closer to the gate, a little closer to Savy, the new love of his life, and he felt bold. “Where do I find you?”

  “Come down to the shop,” Fiasco Joe told him. “We’re always around.”

  Spider pointed out one of the hundred stickers pasted to the back of their doomed-looking vehicle. “Dooley’s Den of Music. Down, down, down on Glenoaks.”

  Accepting that there would be no tour tonight, the trio withdrew. Savy turned once before she disappeared into the side of the van. “Be seeing you, Clay.”

  And Clay lingered at the gate, waving when Spider tooted the horn and swung around. It was only after they’d vanished that Clay realized none of them had been carrying a guitar.

  2

  THE PRETENDER

  He swore to let a week pass before seeking Savy out. But the morning after meeting her, Clay’s desire was a different animal. He needed to ground the dream-like quality of their introduction, make it real again. More, he needed to know if he was compatible enough to play with Savy. Musically speaking.

  Just before noon, Clay drove downhill into Burbank and passed Dooley’s Den twice before spotting the store front, a hole in the wall sandwiched between a laundromat and a toy-train shop. Its sign was faded entirely white and the windows were tinted so dark you couldn’t make out anything in the display. The place looked like a drug front. A facade stolen from a ghost town. Exactly the sort of dump that real musicians hung out in.

  The door gave a cheerful bong-doonnnnng! as Clay entered. It was a music shop alright—marching drums, a piano, and cellos crowded the floor space; trumpets, saxophones, even a harp, hung from the rafters. A pair of gray-haired hands was clutching the Los Angeles Times behind the counter. The bell didn’t stir the hands—as if they were only part of a mannequin, deposited there to spook shoplifters—but then a voice called out behind the pages: “Let my sales staff know if you need help. Touch as you like—but break something and you’ll be putting your Jim Hancock on a sales receipt.”

  “Okay,” Clay replied. “Isn’t it John Hancock though?”

  The top right corner of the paper bent. An eye, bloodshot and unamused, glared back.

  Clay shrugged and hurried through a narrow passage in the dangling instruments, into a second room where colorful Fender and Ibanez guitars lined the walls. And he wandered among the amps and shelves of song books and effects pedals for more than a minute before noticing the rectangular window cut into the back wall. In the soundproof domain beyond was the “sales staff”: Fiasco Joe jumping around, silently thumping his bass as Spider, his spiked hair flat today, pounded away on a 5-piece drum kit. A ridiculous image without the accompanying music. Spastic loonies in a padded cell.

  A moment later, Fiasco caught Clay’s stare and gestured with his head. Clay opened the foam-lined door and was greeted by a skull-splitting crash of cymbals. He recognized what they were playing right away; it was the bridge groove of “McGorgeous” by Karney and the Demons. For the last few years, Davis Karney and his ever-shifting lineup of backup musicians had been something like the Hollywood band. If Rocket Throne was still around, Clay believed Karney would have thanked his stars just to open for them; but genius didn’t grow on trees and “McGorgeous” was a catchy-enough tune. Clay nodded his head along until Fiasco quit his bassline and Spider pulled up short on the beat. “The man with the house!” the bass player shouted into the sudden quiet.

  Spider reached over his toms to soul-shake, but Fiasco only turned to click his amp off. “Figured I’d check you guys out,” Clay said.

  “Glad you did,” Fiasco replied. “Let’s get you an axe to grind. See if you’ve got the stuff.”

  Clay hesitated. “The stuff?”

  “To be in our band, man.”

  “Oh. I didn’t know you had an opening in The Quiet Desperations of Calcut….”

  “Well, I’ve just revealed we do. Also, we’re no longer The Quiet Desperations. We now go by Sunset Rubdown.”

  Spider shook his head. “I told you, Fee, there’s already another band with that name.”

  “Is Savy around?” Clay asked, casual as he could.

  “She’s at work.” Fiasco smirked. “And she doesn’t work here. Don’t worry, though, we can act as her, you know, proxy, and report back.” He stepped into the sales room. “Let me guess, you’re a Fender Strat man?”

  In truth, Clay’s dream instrument was the Rickenbacker 370. Rocco Boyle’s guitar. A fact that Fiasco Joe would have fou
nd obvious and nauseating. The tall bassist didn’t wait for an answer anyway, just pulled an aqua-colored Stratocaster off the wall and thrust it at Clay, who caught it by the neck like a dead duck. He’d figured they would shoot the shit their first time together, see if their personalities jived before any music happened. He’d also assumed Savy would be the one dictating things—and knew she would have, had she been here. “What do you play?” Fiasco prodded. “Know any Yngwie Malmsteen?”

  Clay’s smile felt plastered on. Not only did he not know any Yngwie, he didn’t know what the fuck a Yngwie was—guy, girl, band, subculture? “No prob, no prob,” Fiasco assured him, when Clay shook his head. “We’ve got his song book over here.”

  The bass player made for the rehearsal room again, but this time Clay didn’t move out of his way. “I don’t read music.”

  “Hey, I hear you. Makes the whole idea of rock-n-roll sort of… sterile, right? Like a great big musical condom.” Fiasco threw his hands up. “But until you know the tune, isn’t it easier to have the notation?”

  “I don’t mean I won’t read music, I mean I don’t. I never learned.”

  A moment passed before Fiasco glanced at Spider—with a look of such terrible glee that Clay knew he was being put on. Set up to fail for their entertainment. His cheeks burned. And the hot blood that started pumping was familiar. An anger that was constantly fighting for a way out. How nice it would be to surprise Fiasco Joe with a haymaker to the head, to watch his smile falter and his body crumble. The guy was taller and bigger in the torso than Clay—and arrogant enough to never see the blow coming.

  Spider, for his part, looked uneasy. “How long have you been playing, Clay?”

  “Five years or so.”

  “And it never occurred to you what all those dots and lines meant?” Fiasco wondered.

  “I never took lessons. Always just played by ear. I can figure most things out by listening. ‘McGorgeous,’ for instance, I’ll play start to finish—but I couldn’t tell you the key signature.”

  “Okay, then can you play this by listening?” They waited awkwardly while Fiasco called up Yngwie on Spotify. Finally, the nearby speakers kicked to life with electric guitar work as intricate as the most experimental jazz, only played at twice the speed.

  “Come on, Belasco, you fucking hate Malmsteen,” Spider said. “Let’s pick up ‘McGorgeous’ and see how it vibes—”

  “It’s nothing personal,” Fiasco went on. “And I don’t know how they do things in the Philly scene, since I’ve never heard of a single, worthy band coming from there—but out here on the coast, it’s the big leagues. People travel far and wide to taste a little fame. And our girl—Savy? She’s the best guitar player in the whole fucking Valley. So what we need is a frontman who’s her equal. And a guy musically illiterate?”—his mouth twisted and his voice shifted—“Not gon’ cut duh mustard. It’s nothing personal.”

  “Yeah, you said that already.”

  Spider dropped his eyes to his snare. Fiasco snapped his amp off again. Clay thrust the Fender into the bassist’s chest and spoke directly to Spider. “Maybe we can jam some other time. When Savy’s around.”

  “Why would we want to do that?” Fiasco said. Really, truly begging for it now.

  But the open antagonism was achieving its purpose. Clay felt like Fiasco could see right through him, like he knew that Clay had never recorded a decent song or even played a live show. Just another poseur in a town full of them. Still, Clay held the inquiring eyes. “Because,” he replied, “you want to see Rocco Boyle’s house.”

  This only made Fiasco laugh. “If we want that, we’ll just sic Savy on you. You’d give us everything for a shot at her, wouldn’t you?” Then his brow darkened and Clay understood that the roots of Fiasco’s anonymity ran deep, as deep as Clay’s own, and that any violence he instigated would be met in kind. “Because guys like you aren’t used to not getting their way. Am I right? Mr. I Never Had to Grind for It. Mr. Trust Fund.”

  The Dark Hollywood shuttle idled near the front gates, while clusters of goth girls and Asian tourists peered through the wrought iron and snapped pictures of the gargoyle face and the red-tiled roof rising from the sycamore. Clay pulled behind them in his Jeep and acted like he was there to rubberneck too. To live in the Boyle House was a dream come true, but an oddly self-conscious one. What right did he have to sleep under Boyle’s roof? Back east, Clay had never fit in with his privileged private-school peers. His moral compass skewed toward the Springsteens and Boyles of the world—creative men who’d risen from humble beginnings. But his parents’ affluence made Clay feel spoiled and fake. How can I write about the hardships of the average man when I got a thirty-thousand dollar Jeep for my birthday?

  Contrary to what Fiasco Joe assumed, Clay did not have a trust fund. He generally refused his father’s more lavish gifts and entitlements, save the expensive birthday present, which his mother had insisted was rude to send back. Birthday gifts, and now a multi-million-dollar rock-star estate—Fiasco’s animus-laced voice barked in his head—let’s not forget that, you fucking poseur. But Clay had, and always would, draw the line with music. Any albums he bought, concerts he attended, instruments he played, came from money he’d earned himself. As a result, his gear totally sucked. A roughly used acoustic, a bottom-of-the-line electric (who had ever heard of a Wilsson guitar anyway?), and a 10-watt amp that couldn’t topple a house of cards. Amateur shit. Clay may have had fire in his belly, may have practiced for hours every day and instinctively sang in the right key, may have been able to take a guitar down to its screws and put it back together, but at the end of the day he was just a pretender who hesitated buying serious equipment until he “got into a serious band.” Whose big dreams were little more than tiny delusions.

  Clay watched the tourists mill around outside his new home. Among them was a cute redheaded goth with a hardcover of All Goes Dark peeking out of her shoulder bag. The unofficial Boyle biography, named after Throne’s third album. Clay had read it three times himself, compelled by Boyle’s rise from anonymity to fame.

  At 14, Boyle had run away from Chicago and shit-heel parents who’d had him slinging drugs on the street. Armed with library copies of Into the Wild and On the Road, he hiked highways and thumbed rides and stowed away on freight trains, boxcar-jumping from Seattle to Miami, befriending the lost souls who rode the rails, and trading—legend had it—his winter coat for his first guitar. Transit cops once fingered him for a theft he didn’t commit and beat him senseless while he pleaded his innocence. Boyle had lain in a hospital bed with swollen black eyes and broken ribs, no one listening that a fat public servant had worked over an underage kid who had nothing to do with the crime, and he determined, then and there, that he was going to stand in front of thousands of people one day and be heard.

  When they shipped him back to the South Side, he discovered his father dead, his mother incarcerated for stabbing the old man through his black heart. So Rocco split from foster care and made his way along old Route 66 with nothing but his guitar and whatever money he could muster from day labor. By 18, Boyle had arrived for good in Southern California and went to work slinging burgers at a Mouth House along the Coast Highway, secretly living on its roof for months (on his employment form, under home address, he’d listed the franchise’s own address, adding “penthouse suite,” and no one had been the wiser). It was on that roof overlooking the Pacific that he’d written most of the songs that would appear on Rocket Throne’s debut album. On the beach, he met a surfer named Dave Ganek, who introduced Boyle to Barrett Roethke, a fidgety drummer with a sister who waitressed at the Whisky a Go Go. And at the Whisky they met Hank Ooljee, a seasoned bass player, keyboardist, and Navajo ten years their senior. Right from their first session they knew they had something. And Boyle was soon making good on his vow, his voice heard by sold-out thousands, night after night after night.

  Nowhere in that story was there mention of Boyle walking into a music shop and getting rebuffe
d by the shithead music clerk. Why? Because it never would have happened. Because no one in their right mind would have told Rocco Boyle, “We don’t want you in our band.” Because it didn’t matter if he could read music or sing pitch-perfect. It didn’t matter that he didn’t know, or care, about the brilliant fingerplay of Yngwie Malmsteen. Or that his troubled past would lead him to a more troubled future. None of that mattered.

  Because Rocco Boyle had IT. That certain something that made people drop whatever they were doing and listen. Even the redneck bars who’d booed Boyle early in his career had only done so because they sensed he was exceptionally good at something they did not approve of. No one ever questioned that he was on his way to the top. It was, simply, his destiny.

  But in his rearview mirror, Clay Harper saw no such destiny staring back. He supposed it was every American’s desire—maybe every human’s—to think they were special, to hope they were The Chosen One at something, just waiting for the right circumstances to make it real. Except most lives didn’t make compelling biographies. And the gates of greatness were as closed to Clay as they were to the camera-wielding tourists around him.

  He sat there as a melancholy—as deep and bitter as anything he’d felt since his mother’s death—consumed him.

  After awhile, the Dark Hollywood tour saddled up and moved on. But Clay kept where he was, idling in the shade of the cul-de-sac. “The Only Time” by Nine Inch Nails was blasting from the Jeep’s speakers, Trent Reznor all messed up in you, as a bright yellow Volkswagon lumbered up the street and pulled right past him.

  The driver, a wild-haired woman, leaned out and buzzed the house. Finding herself ignored, she disembarked the rolling lemon and yelled something through the gate. Clay watched, fascinated.