FAREWELL GHOST Read online

  “Up?”

  Clay had imagined they would be playing in some out-of-the-way boiler room. Instead, they entered one of the guest elevators and the car shuttered closed and carried them high above the streets. “Working in this place,” Spider went on, “does have one perk.”

  The elevator seemed to increase in speed the higher they went. Spider tapped his foot to the chug-chugging of the old machinery, typical drummer, full of pent-up energy, always moving, fidgeting, pacing, bobbing his head, his whole body a wind-up spring that never fully wound down. When the car pulled to a stop—so abruptly they both took a sideways step—the door opened to reveal the 11th Floor. Made it, Ma. Top of the world!

  Ahead was a dusty-looking corridor with green carpeting and mahogany doors—once the high-water mark of eloquence, now just old, scratched, and forlorn. “No one lives up here anymore.” Spider gestured down the corridor and curled his fingers to indicate where it turned at a right angle. “You’ll see a black door at the end of the second stretch of hall. I punch the clock in twenty, so I’m going down to finish up.”

  Before Clay could think of a proper reply, the elevator had swallowed Spider again and a hush fell over the floor. The barest minimum of light leaked from every third or fourth fixture, giving the place the look and feel of a mummy’s tomb. Clay didn’t doubt there were ghosts, celebrity or otherwise, in residence here. “Maybe I’ll make some new friends tonight,” he told no one in particular. After the week he’d had, Clay didn’t doubt anything.

  Two nights had passed before Clay could face Boyle again. In their first exchange, the voice had asked him if he was “ready.” To play, man, Boyle elaborated. Why do… ink I used the guitar… attention? And Clay had stammered, “But—how are you still here?”

  I ne… eft, came the reply.

  “You never left?”

  …reposed for years… silence… want, no, need to… music again.

  An awkward silence followed this revelation. Clay clutched the Rick in his arms, but was not in fact ready, preferring to talk more, to warm up to the idea of… what the hell was this even called? Friendly paranormal discourse? Besides, to say there was pressure in playing to a one-man audience, when that one man was your hero, was a little like saying The Beatles had sold a few records and were worshipped by a few Beatlemaniacs. Combine that with the shady notion that this was Clay’s hero disembodied, and his nerves were a live wire, hands shaking and his feet jumping out of time.

  For his part, Boyle’s ghost seemed to understand all of this. It will… in time. Check b… later. Only, leaving the Generator in a drunkard’s sway, Clay doubted he’d ever have courage enough to step inside again.

  So the sun rose and set while he kept away. And then the cycle repeated. Then—

  His curiosity, and a kamikaze desire to fulfill his heart’s intention—to make friends, to master the guitar, to land in a real band, to say nothing of his carnal thirst to impress Savy—led Clay back like a moth to the flame. He’d gone in and sat on the loft steps, waiting ten or more minutes before asking Boyle if he was around.

  And Boyle had responded immediately, as if only waiting for his cue. “This is crazy,” Clay told him. “I mean, if the roles were reversed and I was talking to you… from the beyond, wouldn’t you think you were crazy?”

  Certifiable, Boyle admitted, and again Clay was struck by how accurate the voice was. It was Rocco Boyle, spot on. Or Clay was certifiable.

  How long… you.. en playing?

  Clay shared a brief autobiography, doing his best to curb his Rocket Throne fanaticism. And when Clay insisted he wouldn’t be putting on any grand display of musical prowess, Boyle just told him to get on with it. Start playing and let… rest sort… out.

  So Clay’s fingers found the green pick, the third string of the first fret and the fourth and fifth of the second, and he tried to recreate the song he’d written the night he discovered the guitar. And failed miserably.

  Take a breath, Boyle said, and his voice was growing stronger, clearer, the dial finding the frequency of his voice easier. Play slower.

  A few more stabs and Clay made it through the opening and into the first verse. He’d negotiated all the way through the second chorus before realizing he’d forgotten the bridge entirely. Finally, he managed a choppy version of all the parts strung together.

  Boyle had extraordinary patience for anyone, living or dead; he waited until the last note rang itself out, before telling Clay, constructively, to shorten the intro and give the chorus an extra hook. It’s a start, keep grindin’.

  “I must be boring the crap out of you,” Clay sighed.

  The ghost laughed a familiar laugh. You kidding me? This is… most f… in years.

  And Clay had laughed too. The idea that he could not only hear Boyle’s ghost, but that Boyle might have an interest in hearing him was astounding. A dream within a dream. If Clay had veered off the deep end of sanity, was there a better delusion to be having?

  He ran through the song again, diving into the solo and diving into the solo until his fingers burned. You know your minor pentatonic scale, Boyle told him.

  And Clay mmm-hmmm’d and thought he’d die of embarrassment if the ghost asked him to define what a minor pentatonic scale was. After an hour—or was it three?—Boyle suggested he give the strings a break. Now the words. Give us something to sing along to.

  By then, Clay had played the verses enough to hear them easily in his head. He wrote, scribbling and crossing out as he went, while Boyle tutored him, leaning over his notepad (so Clay imagined) to tell him that a line was too crowded, or how a word could be stretched over a measure. This is how I empty pain, Clay wrote. In a world indifferent and insane. All I am is flesh and feeling, a light so fast and fleeting. Just a shooting, bursting spark. Shouting at these voices in the dark.

  Get a load of you, Boyle laughed. Try… stead of ending on a third chorus, reprise the intro… ’peat that first line.“This is how I empty pain!” In a l… show, it’ll play big.

  “You’ve done this before,” Clay quipped, and he was calmer now, his fear and excitement downgraded to a mild tingle of wonder. In the right circumstances, it seemed you could get used to anything.

  There’ve been a lot of visitors since my death, Boyle told him. You’re the only one who’s heard me.

  “It can’t be great. Being alone all these years. It must…” Clay stopped short of saying it.

  Boyle paused so long that Clay feared he’d departed. It feels good to be creative again. I can’t express how good. So let’s… you in this band, turn the Generator into a music space again. How’s that sound?

  Now Clay’s boots were stirring up dust on The Knickerbocker’s 11th Floor and he wasn’t nearly as nervous as he might have been otherwise. He turned the corner at the end of the hall and spotted the black door that Spider had mentioned, half a city block down. The door led him into a narrow metal stairwell, and the stairs led steeply upward to another black door, which brought him outside onto a red-glowing rooftop—and face to face with the very person he’d come to see. “Well, well,” she said.

  Her hair was down tonight and she had traded her work polo for an undersized Minor Threat shirt. She offered Clay a bro-hug, which he willingly accepted, her warmth moving into him, then away again. “Ever jam on the roof of a famous hotel?”

  “Only twice,” Clay tried, and Savy lifted her brow, impressed. They moved between the stair house and the hotel’s giant air-conditioning units to the open tar-striped space where the source of the roof’s garish red glow—the old and overwhelmingly large knickerbocker letters—stood upon steel girders, beaming into the troposphere. Three Marshall amps and Spider’s drumset were already arranged in the middle of the roof, the cymbals and drum skins glowing hot pink against the lights. It was so red up there that when Fiasco Joe spotted Clay it looked like he had a double case of conjunctivitis.

  “No, no, no,” he shouted. “Him? We’re wasting roof time on Richie Rich?”
r />   “Play nice,” Savy warned.

  “Oh, I’ll play nice—you know that. But him? He can’t tell a G from an F-sharp. Your boy’s illiterate.”

  Clay said nothing in his defense, trying to affect an air of armored detachment. But Fiasco’s barbs still found their way through. To her credit, Savy didn’t bat an eye—though Clay could tell the idea bothered her. “Fee, drop dead, huh?”

  “No, we get to use the roof three, four times a year? I’m not throwing it away on a lot of feedback and fucking up. And come on, look at his axe”—Clay was opening his guitar case—“a Rickenbacker 370? He even scratched it to look like Boyle’s!”

  “This is Boyle’s,” Clay assured him. “It came with the house.”

  “Yeah? Well, money’s not buying your way into the Terrible Geniuses, friend.”

  Savy jammed her finger into the side of her bass player’s head. “First off, we’re not the Terrible fucking Geniuses, or Isosceles Triangle, or any of your other half-baked monickers. Second…” Now she snatched his shirt and dragged him off beneath the girders, where they had a brief and serious conversation. Clearly Fiasco didn’t like what was being said, but he listened. “Come on,” he retorted. “He’s just like Bass, but with less talent!”

  Bass? Emphasis on the “ass,” not the “ace.” As in, the fish. Clay imagined a six-foot Fishman standing at the mic between Savy and Fiasco. Bigmouth Billy, of wall-decor fame, crooning “Take Me to the River,” “Mack the Knife,” and all your favorite bygone hits. It’ll be hard to replace a cultural icon like that, Clay imagined telling Boyle, and he cracked up, loud enough for Fiasco to glance over.

  To avoid deeper conflict, Clay turned away to admire the view—the brightly lit boulevards stretching in every direction; the vehicles (small as slot cars from this vantage) racing along the 101 Freeway; the rounded, space-age tower of the Capitol Records Building; and the ghostly white shadows of the Hollywood sign, floating unlit in the dark of the nearest hillside.

  “Don’t worry about him,” Savy said at his shoulder. “When he was five, he got put in timeout for a crime he did not commit—he’s been a real dramatic dick ever since. Just play well, and you’ll win his respect.”

  Clay half-nodded. “This is a great place to practice. Don’t people complain about the noise?”

  “Most of the hotel residents don’t hear me when I’m screaming right in front of them,” Savy admitted. “Everyone else? It’s Hollywood—it’s supposed to be loud. People assume the music’s coming from the Stone Fox across the street.” She lifted her chin at Fiasco, who was busy tossing extension cords over the side of the building. “We plug into the honeymoon suite on eleven. It’s where Marilyn honeymooned with DiMaggio. Did Spider tell you?”

  Clay indicated that Spider had not.

  “Fucking Spider. Well, this hotel has quite a past. Frances Farmer stayed here.”

  “The one who had her revenge on Seattle?”

  Savy grinned with hot-pink teeth. “She got arrested and dragged out of her room wearing a shower curtain. Not impressed? How about Johnny Mercer? Two of the Three Stooges? Elvis?”

  “Shit, Elvis? You should’ve started there.”

  “Right, Heartbreak Hotel! And then there was Harry Houdini.”

  “This isn’t where that punch killed him, is it?”

  “No, he was dead for years before he got connected to The Knickerbocker. Houdini said after he died he’d report back on what the afterlife was like. So his wife conducted annual séances on the anniversary of his death—Halloween night. Every year for a decade. The last one was held on this roof, right where we’re standing.”

  “Did he show up?”

  “Open to debate. But legend has it, halfway through the séance it started raining—on the hotel and nowhere else. Who knows? Maybe the dead speak in ambiguous ways.”

  They don’t, Clay thought. “Ever see anything yourself? Like you did in the Generator?”

  “You mean like a ghost?” Savy gave him the stink eye, surly and flirtatious. “What do you take me for?”

  “You invited me to your rehearsal, so you can’t be all that stable.”

  “Okay, fair,” Savy laughed. But then her expression tightened. “There’s a few hard and fast rules for jamming though: One is you show up on time—so far, so good. The second is no addicts. Hate to be insensitive, but if you do any snorting, shooting, ingesting, or if you’re just so thirsty you empty every bottle in a five-block radius, we’re not your scene. Cool?”

  “I understand,” Clay replied. And he did—having a brother like Mo, and an idol like Rocco Boyle, had put Savy off people with addictive tendencies. Did he dare confess his high school sins and blow his chances right away? Was it any better to start their relationship on a lie? “I’m not into that shit,” he told her. “It makes for a bad musician.”

  So a lie. Sort of a lie. He was two years sober and believed what he said, at least.

  Savy scrutinized him. She looked like she wanted to say more, but at that moment, Spider sprinted onto the roof and leapt right on his drummer’s throne. “Okay, people, life is short, let’s get it on!”

  In less than a minute they were all plugged in, standing in a loose circle around Spider’s bass drum. They agreed on a Foo Fighters cover to start. “It’s in A Minor,” Fiasco pointed out. He had warned that he didn’t want a lot of feedback and fucking up, but that was exactly how Clay spent the first five minutes of the audition, struggling to adjust amp levels and distortion pedals. Finally, he got himself set and nodded to Savy, and the mood on the rooftop shifted.

  Spider’s stick pounded snare like a heartbeat kickstarted with adrenaline, and a moment later Fiasco’s deep-thrumming bass joined in. Clay stepped to the microphone and the voice that came out of him was smooth, almost confident.

  It wasn’t until that moment that he understood the true power of playing. How an individual sound could unite with others to form one harmonious beast—an audible alchemy as intimate as any human experience. The anger and sadness that too often enveloped him was gone; in its place was a sensation of soaring, of flying out across the starless night.

  And their amps were cranked; a robust sound storm against Clay’s back, strong enough to rattle windows and rumble surfaces. He had spent hours rehearsing “The Pretender” and now his hands moved automatically over the frets, allowing him to focus on vocals. Dave Grohl had long perfected the art of singing clean one moment and screaming his lungs out the next. “The Pretender” chorus was a long exhalation of strung-together words, and when it arrived, Savy and Fiasco jumped on their mics and belted it out with him.

  Savy was a juggernaut of energy, dancing, gyrating. She twisted the volumes higher on their amps, and higher still. In the silence between songs Clay anticipated the approaching wail of sirens, or the rotors of an LAPD chopper, but all he ever heard were car horns, random shouts from the drunks below, and the faint chunka-chunka drone of a rockabilly band pouring it on at the Stone Fox eleven stories down. It was like they were ghosts themselves up here, able to escape the lame restrictions of the mortal world and invoke a decibel riot.

  “Got any originals?” Savy asked, after they’d run through a Quicksand song everyone knew. And here was where she really knocked Clay on his ass. Fiasco and Spider spent a minute or two listening to “Voices in the Dark” before they found an appropriate rhythm-section groove to go with. But it was Savy who launched the song into orbit. Her guitar leads rode across his riffs as gracefully as a surfer over towering waves, giving it a melodic hook here, holding the song together while Clay soloed there, then tearing off a solo of her own that was so fast and flawless it made Clay’s eyes cross. “This is how I emp-tee pain!” he sang, and as Boyle predicted, no one wanted to let that line go, all four of them screaming it.

  And if anyone ever asked Clay about the moment he knew that music was his life, he would surely cite this one, playing with Savy and her band under the fiercely glowing letters of The Knickerbocker Hotel.


  While Fiasco shared a doobie with Spider on the fire escape (cannabis apparently being an exception to the no-drug policy), Clay climbed down to the honeymoon suite with Savy. There were no dead ballplayers or perennial sex symbols waiting there, just dark, completely empty rooms, and from Clay’s perspective he and Savy were as alone as two people could be.

  “I can’t remember the last time I’ve felt so good,” he confessed.

  “Right? If only we could feel that alive all the time.” Savy yanked the extension cords from the outlets and flung them out the window, where they dangled like jungle vines.

  “I’m not as versed as you guys, I know that. I don’t have dozens of shows under my belt and the people I played with back home—”

  “It’s going to take awhile to think it over,” Savy warned. “We’ve been looking for a frontman so long, I sometimes think Robert Plant would fail to make the cut. But whatever happens, you played your heart out. Even Fee didn’t have anything bad to say—which is the only compliment he ever gives.” She looked at Clay so fiercely then that he actually took a step backward. “And I don’t care if you can’t sheet-read music, Clay, you’re a musician. Don’t forget it.”

  “Alright. Thanks, Sav,” he said, and because he didn’t trust that the dim room would conceal his shaking hands, and because he had already collected his guitar case, Clay slipped out of the room while Savy yelled up to her band and, like Elvis before him, left the building.

  That night, Clay learned that Peter had been right. There were footsteps wandering the house. They were subtle at first, low creaks and faint echoes downstairs—the almost non-sound of a skulking burglar—but when they mounted the back staircase, there was no missing them.

  Clay was alone, Peter already burning the midnight oil at his office, and this sounded nothing like his father’s purposeful gait; these were the slow, random steps of a nocturnal drifter. Instinctively Clay reached out for the object nearest his bed—which happened to be Boyle’s guitar—and pulled it from its stand.