The Paradise Gig Page 9

  “You were never one to miss a party,” Pete observed.

  “Oh, you’d be surprised. These days I skip a lot of them. But that one I went to. Turned out to be pretty crazy. Had a ‘90s glam-rock theme. I didn’t get the memo on that, thank God, so I just showed up looking like I look. But there were lots of sequins, sparkles, guys with rouge and false eyelashes, women in stretch leather and spiked hair. The caterers skated by on rollerblades. The DJ was a Bowie lookalike. I mean, it was well thought out. Lots of booze, of course. I think Marco and me were the only two sober people there. But he had a sort of dishonest way of being sober.”

  “Dishonest?”

  “Well, he was one of these guys who always had a glass of champagne in his hand but never actually seemed to drink from it. Like he was trying really hard to look like part of the party but couldn’t risk letting down his guard. I found that sad. I mean, why fake it? Why not just have club soda and admit it’s okay? Anyway, he was a perfectly gracious host, but—how should I put this?—he seemed to like the idea of the party way more than the party itself. He was really pretty shy. So he and I spent a lot of time just sitting and chatting sort of off to the side, and the conversation was friendly and I stayed late so I got invited back. For a little while, I was sort of a regular.”

  “Ah,” said Pete, “so the two of you—” He broke off in mid-sentence, having no idea how to finish it and suddenly wishing he hadn’t started it. “The two of you were—”

  “The two of us were what?” said Callie.

  Tiny fish swam between Pete’s ankles. They tickled but also slightly creeped him out. “I mean, the two of you became—”

  “Became what? Lovers? Pete, you jealous?”

  Caught, he did what people usually do when caught feeling something they believe is undignified and unbecoming. He lowered his eyes, dropped his chin onto his chest, and coughed out a completely unconvincing denial.

  “You are jealous!” Callie said, nodding her head so that gleaming droplets flew from the tips of her hair. “I think that’s nice. I think it’s cute.”

  “It isn’t cute. It’s stupid and adolescent and degrading. And none of my business.”

  “Well, that’s true. But just for the record, no, we did not become lovers. Not even close. Not even imaginable. Frankly, my impression is that Marco is totally asexual. He’s way too armored to get naked with anyone. In fact, I think maybe that’s why I got fired.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Why I stopped getting invited to the parties. Why I stopped hearing from him. I think it’s because he let himself get too close to being naked with me. I don’t mean literally. I mean in terms of stuff he told me. Stuff he probably never talks about. One night he really opened up and I think maybe he was embarrassed afterward or felt too exposed or something, and so he cut me off. I can’t think of any other reason.”

  A chevron of pelicans flew past very close and low, their wingtips grazing the water, making momentary grooves. Their flight was eerily silent, it didn’t even whoosh.

  “So what did he tell you?” asked Pete.

  Callie hesitated. “I don’t really know if I should talk about it. Knowing how private he is and all.”

  Pete nodded understandingly, as though making a sacrifice to discretion and good manners, though the truth was that he was secretly relieved not to hear this guy Marco’s secrets. More secrets, more responsibility. Who the hell needed it?

  “But,” she went on, “I guess there’s no harm in telling you. As long as it’s in confidence, I mean.”

  “In confidence? Callie, you know me. I don’t talk to anybody anyway.”

  “Fair enough. Well, somehow or other he got talking one night about his growing up. How poor he was. How tough things were. Raised by a single mom. Never knew his father and never even really knew his father’s story, beyond that he ended up on the wrong side of some political thing in Cuba and disappeared. So mom came over on her own, with Marco in her belly. And they struggled. She worked her tail off to keep them fed and clothed. Cleaned houses, cleaned offices, cleaned anywhere they’d hire her. Always cleaning up other people’s messes. Marco got more and more upset the more he talked about it. He’s got these strange green eyes. They kept getting darker, muddier, the rims got red. His face flushed this weird coppery color. He talked about how exhausted his mother always was. Never had time or energy to learn much English. He found that humiliating. And she loved him way too hard.”

  “Too hard?”

  “Yeah, that’s how he described it. She loved me too hard. He was her only child. She’d do anything for him. And there was incredible pressure that went with that. She used to tell him that the only thing that mattered in the world was that he should be successful. He should have all the things she couldn’t give him. That would make it all worthwhile. All the sweeping, all the scrubbing. Marco could redeem all that. He had to. As he saw it, he didn’t have a choice. He had to repay his mother for giving them a home, sending him to school, buying him his first recording gear. He had to succeed. It was the only thing that could make sense of all the crap she went through. So he worked and worked, always with this terrible fear that he was running out of time.”

  “Running out of time?”

  “His mother was getting old. Worn out. So he got obsessed with worrying that she’d die before he could show her the gold ring. He worked even harder. Then, just as things were starting to take off, he had a couple of unlucky breaks. I mean, really unlucky.”

  “Like, unlucky how?”

  “Like, freak unlucky. Two of his most promising singers died just as they were starting to break big, right after they had their first hit song. One guy drowned in a weird surfing accident. Ended up trapped under a pier with his ankle leash all tangled up around his neck. The other was mowed down by a hit-and-run driver after some crazy party up in Coral Gables. Just weird, freak, unlucky stuff. Marco said it put him into a real funk. Haunted him. Like he didn’t even know why he was working anymore or who he was doing it for. It didn’t feel like he was doing it for himself. And if he was doing it for Mom, how could it ever be enough? How would he know when he could stop?”

  Pete glanced at the horizon, pseudo-treaded water, and reflected that having parents was just about as troublesome as having children, plus way tougher to avoid. “How about when the old lady dies?” he said. “That might be a good time to stop repaying her.”

  “Apparently not,” said Callie. “She died around six months ago. Marco says that didn’t make the burden any less. If anything, it made it more.”

  “Like in case she’s looking down from Heaven?”

  “Heaven, not exactly. But maybe from the mausoleum he built her on the property.”

  “Mausoleum? You serious?”

  “Totally. A pretty little building facing out toward the Gulf. Bronze door. Carved coral columns. Grated window like a Cuban shrine. Has her name on it and everything.”

  “Weird,” pronounced Pete.

  “Very. But symmetrical at least. The relationship, I mean. She did everything for him, he dedicates everything he does to her. But anyway, he’s telling me all this, very worked up, close to tears sometimes, then at some point he just shuts down, seems embarrassed and mad at himself for saying so much, and sort of took it out on me, I guess. Just by shutting me out after that. That was two, three months ago.”

  There was a sputtering clatter in the sky. An ancient red bi-plane labored past, dragging a banner promoting car insurance. The banner undulated prettily in the prop-wash of the single engine. But who wanted to think about car insurance while lying on a beach or wading in the ocean?

  “So no more parties?” Pete said.

  “Not for me.”

  “But you didn’t mind calling him up to ask for an audition for your son.”

  “No, I didn’t mind.”

  “There you go. Mothers will do anything for their kids.”

  “Yeah, they will. But this didn’t seem like a big deal. I was jus
t asking a favor. He could say yes or he could say no. He ended up saying a little bit of both.”

  “Come again?”

  “He agreed to do the audition,” Callie said, “but at the same time he sort of tried to talk me out of it. It was strange. Not clear at all. He talked about how you never knew what might come of an audition, the consequences of it. I assumed he meant it would be a big disappointment for Sarge if it didn’t work out, that it would really be awful for his confidence. Marco said it wasn’t only that, it’s just that you could never tell where things might lead. I told him I understood all that, even though I really didn’t. Anyway, he said I should put Sarge in touch with him, so I did.”

  “And the audition went well?”

  “He thinks it did. Got a really great song to work on. He goes back in tomorrow. Fingers crossed.”

  As she said this, she lifted her hands out of the water, looked at them, and frowned. “I better go in,” she went on, pivoting toward shore. “I’m getting pretty pruney.”

  Pete stifled a sigh. He remembered her fingertips when they were like that, corrugated, ridged. They’d felt like cool, brushed corduroy against his neck and shoulders. He watched the water streaming down her legs as he followed her back to the beach.

  14

  W ell, I believe I’ve mentioned before that my Master is a very snazzy dresser. Snazzy to a fault, some might say, but that’s a matter of taste. Personally, I’d rather look at people with a style and the balls to stick to it however the winds of fashion may blow, rather than a bunch of khaki cutouts who play it safe and wear what everybody else is wearing. Besides, given human beings’ extremely deficient sense of smell coupled with their squeamishness about having their behinds sniffed, how can they even tell each other apart without some pizzazz in their wardrobes? I mean, let’s face it, naked human beings look way more alike than different. True, they come in different colors and some people make a big deal out of that, though for the life of me I can’t see why. But even allowing for the pigment thing, the fact is that humans don’t even come close to the variety you see in dogs, which is why us dogs do not need loud ties or feather boas or designer handbags to make us look distinctive. A naked poodle will never be mistaken for a naked Doberman. A St. Bernard doesn’t need lederhosen to make it clear he’s not a shih-tsu. Or take ears. One look at a spaniel’s ears and you know he’s not a German shepherd. People, okay, they got some specimens with hairy ears or ears that stick out, but I doubt you’ll ever come across a person with ears down past his shoulders. Or take weight. We got two-pound Pomeranians and Mastiffs that top two hundred. People, there’s skinny and there’s fat, but a hundred times heavier? I’ve never come across that and I hope I never will. Anyway, where I’m going with this is that, if the whole idea of clothes is that you don’t want to look exactly like the guy on your left and the guy on your right, why not be bold, go big? At least that’s the way Master seems to see it, and I totally agree.

  Anyway, the reason I went into this whole thing about clothes is that the next thing that happens in the story was on an evening when Master was getting all dressed up. Or “putting on the dog,” as people say. Just as an aside here, what the fuck is that supposed to mean? Can anybody out there tell me? It’s not like anybody actually wears a dog. So it’s a puzzling expression. Why not putting on the horse? Putting on the cow? I just don’t get it.

  In any case, what Master was putting on was a special outfit that he only wears on one Tuesday evening every other month, which is when this place called Froggy’s down on Duval Street has a special karaoke night featuring songs by a band that was way before my time but I gather very popular called The Beatles. Apparently the band wore very skinny gray sharkskin suits with pencil-thin legs that crinkled up behind their knees when they dipped in time to the music. The jackets had no lapels, which I guess put them right on the bubble between formal and not, and the shirts didn’t really have collars, they just sort of came up to the Adam’s apple and stopped. I guess it was trendy and cool and all of that but it looks sort of chopped off to me. Either that or some smart tailor was saving a lot of cloth. Anyway, Master still has a suit like that, and let me tell you something, that sharkskin really catches the light. From certain angles it looks like sheet metal. You could blind somebody with it. His shirt, it must be said, is slightly frayed around the buttonholes and at the top where the collar would normally be, and the jacket binds a little bit around the middle, given that the basic cut was never intended for geriatrics whose abs are not exactly washboards anymore, but all in all Master looks sharp as hell in it.

  And of course I have a matching jacket.

  As I have mentioned or bragged or complained on occasion, Master likes to dress us up in matching clothes sometimes. Sometimes I enjoy this and sometimes I hate it. It depends on the outfit. I mean, it’s great, very flattering, that he wants us to look alike, that he’s proud to be with me, that he wants to show the world we’re buddies. On the other hand, some of these get-ups, given my diminutive stature…well, some of them look like they were designed for Barbie or some shit. Or they’re just too over the top cute, like for a grinning monkey peeling a banana. I mean, can we have a little dignity here? Anyway, the sharkskin jacket I actually kind of like. It scratches and feels a little bit like wearing tin foil, but style has its cost and that’s just how it is.

  But okay, enough about the clothes.

  So we go down to Duval Street, and I guess I should say just a few words about that. You know how people go to zoos to see the animals? Well, that’s how I feel about Duval. It’s a show, or maybe a circus is more like it, featuring the amusing though generally incomprehensible antics of another species. You got people on Harleys whose handlebars are so high that they can hardly reach them and when they stretch way forward to go vroom-vroom it sometimes pulls their jeans down so you can see their cracks and, excuse me, this is really not attractive. You got people with studs and rings and lengths of chain hanging from their nose or lips or nipples. You got roving packs of drunk young women trying not to topple off their platform shoes and drag queens who look pretty convincing but still, to a practiced schnoz like mine, smell like guys once you get past the perfume and the hairspray. You got people wearing paint instead of clothes, paisleys and such. Blue and orange lights come flashing out of bars. Guitars are twanging everywhere, cars go by playing music so loud that their rivets buzz.

  The place called Froggy’s definitely contributes its share of noise and glare. It’s an open-air joint with a big square bar under a fake thatch roof. Behind the bar there’s a stage with spotlights and gigantic speakers and a screen that shows the words of the songs. The stage is raised up a few feet and faces back out toward the sidewalk, just in case there isn’t already enough mayhem going on out there.

  So we cruise in, Master picks me up and holds me in the crook of his arm and sidles toward an empty stool more or less in the middle of the place. A bartender comes over and looks us up and down in our matching sharkskin suits. “Novelty act?” he says.

  “Say wha’?” says Master.

  “You and the pooch. You gonna perform? We got a sign-up sheet.”

  “Nah. Just here to listen and appreciate and maybe shoot the breeze with another Beatlemaniac or two. You’re familiar with that expression, I presume.”

  “Yeah, if I hear it one more time I think I’ll shoot myself. What ya drinking?”

  So Master asks for an Old-Fashioned “and a couple extra cherries for my friend here.”

  I love it when he calls me his friend.

  So the show starts, everybody gets to sing one song, and the first thing I notice is that people have a lot of different ways of how they get on terms with the microphone. Some people approach it very slowly, cautiously, with their heads craned forward but their bodies holding back, like they’re afraid it’ll explode. Other people go right after it with gusto, like it’s a big juicy carrot they’re about to chomp. Other people again move toward it sort of teasingly, kissingly
, like, excuse me but I don’t know how else to say it, like they’re gonna give it a blowjob. (What, you think I’ve never seen a porn flick?) Most people leave the microphone in its stand, but a few yank it out and hold it like it was meant for them and them alone and no one’s gonna take it away from them and no one else is even gonna get a turn if they can help it. Anyway, I don’t know if this or that approach to a microphone has anything to say about how different people deal with life in general, I’m just saying it’s something I noticed.

  Another thing I noticed is that some people had obviously rehearsed for this. They knew the words and just when to start singing and just when to stop. Other people looked like they were up there because they lost a bet. Their big vocal entrance came along and they just stood there, then in the next second they seemed to realize that they’d choked, then they sang really fast to try to catch up with the music but got all tongue-tied on the words, then they shot their buddy a look as if to say, I can’t believe you’re making me do this, you schmuck.

  As for the singing itself, hey, I’m no critic, but I think it’s safe to say that not everyone who thinks they have a good voice does. All in all, the fast songs came off better than the slow ones. It was the long drawn-out heartfelt notes that kind of hurt my ears. Too much emotion, too little precision, and too much time to notice. Then again, dogs hear pitches differently from humans, so maybe I’m just being too picky and missing out on the easy-peasy spirit of the thing. Or maybe I am a critic, after all.

  Anyway, we sit through eight or ten acts doing Fab Four covers—mostly solos, but with a duo and even a quartet thrown in here and there. Master is on his second cocktail and I’m on my third or fourth maraschino cherry with whisky sticking to it, when suddenly there’s a harsh, bright flash from the stage. Actually, there’s two harsh bright flashes. And what should we see up there, but two guys in shiny, blinding sharkskin suits just like mine and Master’s. Same jackets without lapels. Same shirts without collars. Same metallic gleam off the miracle-fiber polyester. Like all four suits came off the same final markdown sale rack. Like the four of us could start a band.