Scratch and the Sniffs Read online

  This was getting to be a first-rate performance. Jerome had jumped up onto the roof of the Lincoln to scream his case, and if he could muster up this much mustard all the time, we might have to make him the group’s front man.

  “I’m not going to take it anymore,” he railed. “Look, Ling and Steven didn’t even leave me any sticks to play with. They each have a pair of drumsticks. What am I supposed to hit my one cymbal with, my face?”

  I wheeled cautiously up to the car, laughing all the same. It was hard to even talk. “If we get you a pair of sticks, will you come down and join us?”

  He stood up there hyperventilating. He thought it over.

  “No. I want to trade with somebody. I don’t care who, I just don’t want to be the biggest dink in the act.”

  To the rescue came the ever-gallant Cecil, who silently offered Jerome his washboard.

  “Fine,” Jerome said, stomping down off the car. “I’ll play the stupid triangle.”

  5

  The Kinks

  MAYBE IT WAS TIME TO find out if we could play.

  Scratch, whether he wanted to admit it or not, was great. Every morning when I showed up at the club, he was already there, churning out some nasty beautiful noise or another. But when the rest of us came along to take up our positions alongside him, well, that’s where we had to work out some kinks.

  The first problem was Lars. He just wouldn’t go away. He became—when he was wearing his protective red Fender Stratocaster guitar and his favorite tight black muscle shirt—the guy you could not insult. Believe me, I tried.

  “Hey, Lars,” I said. “Nice shirt, but doesn’t a person stop growing out of their clothes at some point?”

  He strummed away, smiling. “Oh, I stopped growing when I was in eighth grade.”

  “No, I mean physically.”

  He just laughed and laughed, as if he had any idea what I had even said. The old crock, he was just having himself too good a time to be really bothered by my cracks.

  We’d have to put a stop to that.

  Two thirds of the drum team were all business. Steven and Jerome showed up to work early, took their places at the kit, and tippy-tapped around the instruments, trying to feel their way in. I gave everybody a lot of space those first few days, trying not to put too much pressure on, but I was listening closely. Steven, in particular, didn’t sound half bad. From his setup halfway across the garage from the guitars, he would coolly try to lock on to whatever the guitarists were noodling with. When he had a beat on it, he’d slip himself in there with a tap, ta ba-ba-bap, using only one drum at a time so as not to get too complicated. He fit, and didn’t get in the way at all. Good boy, Steven.

  Jerome eventually warmed to his job, and in no time sounded like one of the top ten triangle players in the whole neighborhood. When his confidence built, he would move from that to the tambourine, to the cymbal, hitting each one once and only once, before moving on to the next instrument. Ping … one-two-three … ting … one-two-three … You wouldn’t call it percussion, so much as flavor, but it was … tidy.

  You know the phrase different drummer?

  The day we had scheduled for our first actual jam together, Ling-Ling treated it like it was his own personal opening night at Caesar’s Palace.

  He wore a purple silk bowling shirt with “Vic the Stick” embroidered over the pocket. He wore enormous Elton John 1970s pink sunglasses.

  “Singlasses, I call them,” he said.

  I couldn’t let that one go. “Hah. What sin did you ever commit, Lung?” They can’t stand it when I call them body parts. “Eat the last Fig Newton? Leave the toilet paper roller empty, you ol’ desperado?”

  Ling lowered his glasses and looked over them with a grim, dramatic squint. “You don’t want to know what I did. Serious stuff, another life. It’s best for you if you know nothing, in case they come around looking.” He pushed his glasses back up his meaty face, adjusted his Robin Hood hat with the yellow and green feathers, and sat down with his big fat mystery life behind the bass drum.

  “Hey, Vic,” I said to him. “You’re a mental case.”

  “Hey, who loves ya, Wolf-man?”

  And I always thought it was the lead singer who was supposed to be a group’s Hollywood prima donna nutball. Fortunately, we had a lead singer who had his head on straight.

  “Now, what we want out of this is money, right? Is everybody clear on that?” I asked as we took our places for the first in-house test of our talent. “That’s what music is all about, as everyone knows. You get people all excited and worked up and crazy until they want to give you their money. Then you politely take it from them. So we will have to not stink, first off. Then we have to be a little different, second off, which shouldn’t be too much of a problem since we are the world’s first punk-hillbilly-jug-drum-corps band.”

  “You got honest-to-god hillbillies in this band?” Cecil asked aggressively. He threw down his washboard and jumped up into a fighting stance. “Who is it?”

  “Easy there, Tumbleweed. Just sit back down and chew off a hunk of tobacco to calm yourself.”

  He did. He pulled the sticky-looking chaw out of the bib of his overalls. “Aw, but it ain’t even real plug, y’know. It’s only a wedge of bubble gum that I soak overnight in a glass of Dr Pepper to make it look right. My maw says I can’t be chewin’ the real stuff till—”

  Chwaaaannnggg.

  The key, of course, to good guitar playing is timing.

  “Nice timing, Scratch,” I said, clapping and hooting him on. He went with it, turning up his volume, sawing on the strings, creating distortion, buzz, squeals and screams.

  “Yeah!” I yelped into my microphone, which was actually plugged into an old stereo. “Yeah, baby, yeah!”

  I have to be honest. I was kind of hoping my voice was going to sound a little better, a little stronger, a little more … musical when it came out of speakers than when it came out of my mouth. This was a disappointment. I yelled into it—no words yet, just attitude—harder and harder to make it sound better.

  “Hey, Pavarotti,” Steven yelled. “Maybe you should turn it on.”

  Well, that was pretty embarrassing.

  “Never mind me,” I said. “You just play your drum, rhythm slave. Or do you need me to come over there and read you the directions?”

  True, Steven was just more or less staring as Scratch played. As was everybody. They couldn’t make anything out of it.

  “Ah, I don’t know the song,” Steven said.

  “Ya,” chimed the other players. The washboard, bass drum, and triangle remained unplayed.

  Lars started to strum something that seemed distantly related to what Scratch was doing. Very distantly related, like a twelfth cousin or something.

  Scratch was not concerned with our struggle. He did not slow down or speed up or simplify. He did not explain, and he did not instruct.

  Ping.

  “There!” I yelled. “See. See. Jerome’s got it. Jerome knows. Way to go there, Jerome.”

  “It’s a triangle, ya dope,” Steven said to me. “That doesn’t tell us anything. Jerome doesn’t need to know what’s going on. He can go ping to whatever Scratch plays.”

  “Hey,” Jerome snapped, visibly wounded. “I’m working over here, I’ll have you know. I am trying to make art out of this, and if you think it’s so easy, you can just take this triangle and fit it—”

  “All right already,” Steven said. “I was only—”

  “Ya, well, if you’d spend a little more time beating on your drum, and a little less beating on your hairy johnny chest, maybe we could work this out.”

  “Go Jerome,” I laughed, which naturally incited Steven, who began slamming on his snare with both sticks and staring so hard at me that I thought he was going to launch himself right over the percussion section into my lap. We can all imagine what he was fantasizing he was beating on, can’t we?

  “I love this!” Lars squealed. “This is just like the Pisto
ls! They hated each other’s guts too.”

  “We hate each other?” Cecil asked. Poor Cecil. “I thought we was a club that liked each other but hated women.”

  “That’s right,” Jerome kicked in. “We do hate women. We don’t hate each other.”

  Steven looked at me. “Oh yes we do,” he said.

  I had to laugh. Really loudly, through my microphone. This was finally starting to be fun.

  But the truth was, Steven turned out to be the motor. As he tattooed his drum, everyone picked up on his savagery. Ling boom-boomed. Cecil chikka-chikka’d his washboard. Jerome murdered his poor tambourine. The way Steven absolutely attacked the two drums he had—still one at a time—inspired the rest of us to follow him. His arms extended fully as he beat the skin off the snare with a might I had never seen—not in his fighting anyway. It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t coordinated, it wasn’t particularly musical. But it was ferocious.

  It was us.

  “Hey, Steve-o,” I taunted. “You got something personal against that particular drum, or you working on some kind of a therapy thing? You got a problem you want to share with the rest of the group?”

  He just kept slamming away, staring at me—which was fine, if it got him playing.

  “Yo, Wolfie,” Jerome cut in. “We hear you talking, but, you know, at least we’re contributing.”

  “Ya, wheel-daddy,” the new jazz-version Ling added. “You talkin’ a good game, but you ain’t showin’ nobody nothin’.”

  Ah. So the moment had arrived.

  6

  Time to Howl

  I ONLY SING AFTER LUNCH. Hey, I’m not being difficult, but I am the centerpiece, the linchpin, the … okay, I’ll say it, I’m the star. I didn’t ask for it, didn’t demand it, but everybody knows that if an act is going to make it, there has to be a certain force at the center of it. The guy with the lips in the Rolling Stones. Kurt Cobain when he was still alive with Nirvana. The blond guy who tames tigers in the circus. Tom Jones.

  Moi.

  I can’t help it if I’m cursed with what we in the business call “star power.” Charisma. No kidding, everywhere I go, people point at me on the street, they smile, they whisper, they gawk. I can’t usually hear, but I can tell what they’re saying. “You’ve got it, cowboy,” is one probability, along with “That’s a lot of man there.”

  So it is my responsibility—my duty, for crying out loud—to preserve and nurture my gifts. That’s why I can’t strain my voice before lunchtime.

  And also that gave me more time to figure out how the heck I was going to sing to Scratch’s playing.

  “Please,” I whisper-begged so no one else could hear. “Please, Scratch, what was that song you were playing? I couldn’t figure it out, so I couldn’t sing it. What was it?”

  “How should I know?” he said calmly. “You gonna finish that banana?”

  “Here, have the banana. Now tell me what words to sing when you play.”

  “Sing whatever words you want,” he said as he shoved the whole banana into his mouth. “It’s all the same to me.”

  “Thanks, Scratch, you’re a big help. How am I going to figure out … hey, you know you’re not supposed to eat … you know the peel of the banana is kind of … fine, Scratch, eat the peel.”

  Great help he was, but what can you expect from a guy who eats the skin off his food and the leather off the steering wheel, and sprouts? I saw him one day, actually eating sprouts. “And maybe you could change those pants one of these days, huh, Scratch,” I said as I moved off to find somebody helpful. “They’re starting to get pretty shiny there.”

  “They’re vinyl pants. They’re supposed to be shiny.”

  It was starting to erode my brain, hanging with these guys. Like standing in front of a leaky microwave all day long.

  “Now, what we do in south Alabama,” Cecil said, picking up on my problem, “is, practically everybody writes their own songs. And it don’t make no difference what the tune is. If you’ve ever been to a barn dance you can figure out how to fit the words to it. Should I show you?”

  No. Now this was simply going too far. I had to draw the line somewhere. I had my dignity, after all. The answer was no.

  Probably. What good would it do me to listen to Cleetus here singing about I’m so lonesome I could hug a chicken? I mean …

  Hey, that’s not bad. Maybe not a chicken, but close. Hmmm.

  “All right, I got no time for pride right now, I’ve got to catch a rocket to stardom. Educate me.”

  “Sure then, you go like this: If they’re playin’ it fast, you gotta sing about fast stuff, which means (a) your car, (b) your lifestyle, (c) your old girlfriend, who ain’t no good. Now, on the other hand, if they’re playin’ it nice and gentle, then you got to sing about nice stuff and gentle stuff like (a) your dead dog, (b) huntin’, or (c) your new girlfriend who is like an angel straight outta heaven.”

  The question was, was stardom really worth this?

  “Don’t tell me any more, Festus,” I said. “I think I’m gonna puke.”

  “Naw, you just don’t know what it sounds like yet, that’s all.”

  He took a couple of lungfuls of air, preparing to demonstrate.

  “No!” I yelled, stopping him just in time, before god-knows-what came out of him. “Let’s just go up there and surprise ourselves, shall we? It’ll be more fun if we don’t know too much ahead of time.”

  Cecil beamed at the thought. “You are fully correct,” he said. “That will be more fun. I gotta tell you, Wolf, you are, every day, the most fun feller I have ever met.”

  I shook my head at him. “Killer,” I said, “I cannot even imagine what kind of a sorry life you must have led back there in Alabama.”

  When we reassembled to make musical history, we were ready. Scratch had fortified himself with all the nutritional items a garage had to offer—some loose bolts, a fan belt, a can of 10W-30 motor oil. Jerome and Steven had spent the break spitting at each other over the band’s percussion philosophy. (Jerome: “Don’t tell me when to hit my triangle, Steven. I will decide when the song needs a ping, and if I think it needs one every two seconds, then I will ping my brains out.” Steven: “Fine, Jerome, if you want every six-year-old in the city to come running every time we play because they think we’re a stupid ice-cream truck.”) Ling had set his bass drum and stool up on top of a stack of pallets, and was practicing a very cool unsmiling nod to the crowd.

  And of course, the Singer was ready now, without a song.

  We all stared at each other for a while.

  “So,” Jerome said. “How do we start?”

  “Jeez,” Cecil marveled, “this bunch really is starting from scratch, huh?”

  “Har-har,” Scratch said.

  Cecil was already falling behind. “What? What’d I say?”

  “Nevermind,” I said. “But he’s right, Scratch. You go. We’ll follow.”

  I thought now I might be able to sneak this one through. “So, which song are we going to start with?”

  He shrugged. “The fast one.”

  And that’s what it was. In fact, that was about all it was. Scratch ripped into the music like he was peeling away from the line in a drag race.

  Steven jumped on, snappety snappety snappety snappety.

  Ling listened, nodded, nodded, started banging, boom buboom boom buboom.

  Ting.

  Lars did his thing, which, I hate to admit, was the real thing, an instrument playing a tune, with notes and a structure. He worked up a rhythm that Cecil then imitated on his washboard. Our lead guitarist was still out there on an untethered walk in space, but we had our group noise going, and this appeared to be where I came in.

  “Go, Wolf,” Jerome called.

  “Ya,” said Steven. “If you can’t keep up, Wonder Wheels, pull over into the breakdown lane.”

  He said it really loud, too. Terrible things were happening here, and I don’t mean the music—though that was terrible enough. I think it w
as the drum making Steven so bold and clever. It was the big bass making Ling into a cross between Michael Jackson and Boris the Dancing Bear. Even Lars, who was such a wonk before he strapped on his Fender … okay, bad example, but anyway, these guys were all gaining power while I was being drained of mine because … because …

  Because of my little secret problem.

  “Join the party,” Cecil hooted. “The music shall set you free.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to be free,” I said, rapidly losing my nerve. I tapped the microphone lightly with my index finger. It sounded like thunder.

  Scratch played harder, harder, wilder. Everybody followed him.

  “You don’t even know what you’re playing,” I scolded them all over the P.A. “You’re making fools of yourselves, I must tell you.”

  I don’t even think they were listening to me at this point. (And from the sound of it they definitely weren’t listening to each other.) They were all off in their own spaces, bearing down on their instruments, flogging the entire history of music into submission.

  And loving the bejesus out of it.

  So who slipped me the kryptonite? What had happened to the Wolf we had all grown to know and fear and respect and emulate and love? (Well, all the other stuff, anyway.) What was missing here?

  “Hey,” Steven called above the din. He waved me over toward him with one drumstick while he flailed away aimlessly with the other.

  Reluctantly, sheepishly, I answered his summons—which is how you could tell that I was simply not right. When I’d wheeled up close to where he was sitting, he grabbed the microphone out of my hand.

  “Lemme show you,” he said, laughing. Then he shrieked his song into the mike:

  Oh, Wolf-o’s scared witless what He-Men’ll think,