Paid to Play
The promoter, Lloyd, paid the band the
full twenty-five hundred, although Craig, the singer, knew there’d been fewer
than 200 people in the bar all night. The windmill-shaped Dutch Bar and Grill
was new and yet already settling into unloved status. It had begun to smell of
stale beer and exhaustion.
“No cover charge, either,” Craig said
to Bob, the guitarist. “They can’t have taken in more than a couple of thousand,
gross.”
Coiling one of Andy’s cables, Bob
said, “I signed a contract, though. We get paid.”
“Look at that guy –” Craig inclined
his head towards Lloyd. “He’s a fuckin’ shark if I ever saw one. We didn’t manage
to sell half our share of the tickets and I would have sworn he’d take it out
of our fee.”
“My dad told me a promoter once hung
him out of a fourth-floor window by his ankles until he agreed to waive payment
for a gig,” Andy said.
“That sounds like something Lloyd would
do,” Craig said darkly.
Bob looked over at the promoter. He
was mostly indistinguishable from the rock bands he booked. Tall, lanky,
mid-length hair in a man-bun, Misfits t-shirt, jeans and boots. Whatever triggered
Craig’s suspicions wasn’t apparent to Bob. Lloyd had paid up. Everyone always
paid Bob’s band.
Yeti, the drummer, was piling his
equipment into the van, singing noisily.
“Get the gear loaded,” Andy said to
the others. “It’s two in the fucking morning.”
“We should leave it here,” Craig
said. “We’re playing here tomorrow night, after all.”
“Tonight,” Bob corrected him. “And,
no way. The gear would be stolen, sold and out of the state by sunrise.”
Craig picked up Bob’s Lake Placid
Blue Telecaster and pulled out the jack plug. He hadn’t gotten the guitar half-way
to its case before Bob caught up with him, shoved him hard against the wall and
pulled the guitar neck out of his hand. “Don’t touch my fucking guitar, Craig,”
he grated. “I’ve told you before. Nobody touches the fucking Tele.” He ran his
thumb over the strings, checking it was still in tune. Satisfied, he placed it
in its case. Craig brushed himself down and glared at Bob. Bob knew he wouldn’t
continue the fight. Craig appreciated the guitarist’s uncanny money-charming
abilities.
Yeti was standing by the loading dock
door as they carted their cases out. Bob’s strum, the tinking noise of the
unamplified strings, prompted him to ask a question. “You never use standard
tuning, do you, Bob? It’s always that weird one.”
“DADGAD,” Bob said, mollified by
Yeti’s interest in his technique.
“I’m surprised you can play, like,
blues standards, if you never change tuning,” Yeti said.
“I’ve used it for years. I can play
anything. You know, it’s a tuning Jimmy Page used on a lot of Zeppelin songs.”
“Yeah! Led Zep!” said Yeti, punching the night air.
In the distance a dog howled, the sound muffled by the swish of a windmill sail
coming down above them.
“Isn’t Page a black magician?” Andy
said, conversationally.
Bob flinched. Nobody noticed. In a
parody of a pastor’s quiet sermonizing tone, he steepled his hands and said,
“Aren’t all guitarists, in our own small way, black magicians?” The others
laughed and Bob picked up his bottle and drank the last of his beer. The dog howled again, then shut up with a
yelp. Bob flung the bottle against the windmill where it broke with a
disappointing tinkle. “Let’s go,” he said.
Word of mouth must have spread,
because that night barely anybody turned up. A few people wandered in, heard
the live music and went right back out. After the second set, Lloyd turned up,
and with his jaw clenched tight, handed over a wad of cash. All four musicians kept their eyes on him and
their arms free at their sides, subconsciously prepared for a fight. But
Lloyd’s expressionless face didn’t display aggression. “I’ll see you tomorrow,”
he said. “At Wainwright’s in Long Beach, right?”
“Right,” Yeti said, watching him as
he walked away. “I’d forgotten Wainwright’s was one of his venues. Buck up,
Bob. You look like you felt someone walk over your grave. If Lloyd starts
anything, we’ve got your back.”
“It’s not that,” Bob said. He was
listening to a low growl in the distance. It sounded like a very big dog. A
humongous dog, only a few blocks away now.
Yeti unlocked the loaded van and the
others rushed to climb in. He pushed the
starter button, took his foot off the brake, then stopped before the van had
moved more than a few yards. He pointed at a yellow blinking light. Low tire
pressure. Bob got out and searched
around his door panels for the lug wrench and passed it to Craig who
laboriously wound the spare tire out of its hidey-hole under the cargo
bay. It, too, was flat.
“Fuck it,” Yeti said. “I’ll lock the van and
leave it here tonight. I’ll get an Uber tomorrow with a new tire.” He sighed, then
belched. “I’m not coming back tonight. Those coyotes sound hungry.”
“You can hear that howling?” Bob said. “It’s a
fucking dog.”
“Of course I can hear it. Sounds like
a pack of coyotes to me.”
Craig and the rhythm section got an
Uber northwards, and Bob called his own.
That goddamned dog, he thought as the Hyundai pulled up outside
the windmill. The Hell Hound was most
definitely on his trail. Nine more months of life.
Bob had met the Devil almost twenty
years ago, at a crossroads in La Brea. It was by prior arrangement, but he was
still surprised when the horned man waded out of a tar pit and took his guitar
in his claw. “You want me to tune the Tele?” the Devil had asked in a polite
tone.
Bob nodded.
“Usual 20-year term?” said the Prince
of Darkness.
Being young, hungover, starving and arrogant,
it hadn’t occurred to Bob to come up with a watertight contract. He mumbled
something about how he wanted to be a great guitar player and be, like, a
successful musician.
The Devil tuned his guitar—making sure not to use standard
tuning, handicapping Bob for evermore. (Well, for twenty years.) “Don’t let anyone touch your guitar,” the Devil
said. “It’ll stay in tune. If anyone retunes it, the contract’s up immediately.
One soul, to be collected by black dog. Guard it with your life.” He licked his
lips, showing Bob his flickering, forked tongue.
Bob really should have put more
language in that deal. Nowadays everyone
said, “Oh, Bob’s a great guitarist,” but it was meaningless. In terms of world-class
greatness, he was short of the mark. And though he became successful in business
terms—he made between three-
and four-times scale everywhere he played—he had not sold a million records or even a million
downloads. He had never signed with a major. No groupies or supermodels or
videos helmed by Quentin Tarantino. He didn’t even have a coke-fueled breakdown
to bleakly undergo and wearily recover from. Just the basics of his hasty deal:
Great guitar player; always gets paid; will be dragged down to Hell (at the
latest) in December 2020 by a black dog the size of a bison.
And now he had left his guitar in an unguarded
van.
“Turn around, man,” he said to the
Uber driver. “Don’t argue. Look, here’s
a hundred bucks. Turn around!”
He was too late. The van doors had
been jimmied and the guitars and a Fender Twin Reverb amp had been taken. The
drums in their cases were rolling in the parking lot. The windmill sail above Bob
swooped down, hissing like the pendulum blade in the pit. Poor Bob fell down on
his knees, but no supernatural dog appeared.
He arrived at Wainwright’s that
evening with a borrowed Mosrite guitar. Andy had found a bass and they played a
rousing set, fueled by residual anger and victimhood. There was an audience, of
sorts.
They didn’t get paid.
The bar owner shrugged. “That guy
Lloyd handles the money,” he said. “Or handled, past tense. Pack of wild
coyotes got him. Would ya credit it?”
A cop returned Bob’s Telecaster the
next day. Lloyd had been attempting to sell it at Spike’s Guns and Pawn in Huntington
Beach, when he’d taken it out of its case and tried to retune it by ear. “Never
seen anything like it before,” the cop said. “Blood everywhere. Didn’t see it
coming. Damn thing just appeared. The pawnshop guy says it was a dog, but Forensics
swears it was a bear.”
Bob sat down and played some chords.
“All these years I was wrong,” he whispered to the guitar. “Retuning you voided
the contract. The Devil came for the soul he was owed. He didn’t ever say it
would be my soul.” He laughed until the tears came.
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