Outside the Gates of Eden Page 7

  “I’m Corrina,” she said.

  “Cole,” he said, standing up to reach across the table and take her hand. “Have a seat. I’ll find us another one.”

  He held his chair for her while she walked around the table and sat down.

  “Damn,” Donald said. “Is that how they do it in college?”

  It took him three tries to find a table with an empty chair. “Can I borrow this?” Cole asked. The three men at the table were huge, one with a heavy beard, another with a jagged scar on his lip.

  “We’re using it,” said the bearded one.

  The one with the scar tilted his head toward Cole’s table. “Think the boy wants it for Corrina.”

  “Hell, take it then.”

  “Thanks,” Cole said.

  He set the chair down far enough from her not to crowd her. Not too much, anyway.

  “What college you go to?” Corrina asked.

  “ut,” Cole said, and then, his conscience pricking him, “in about a year and three months.”

  That got a more convincing smile out of her. “You don’t look like a roughneck. Summer job?”

  He moved closer so as not to have to shout quite so loudly. “For another 57 days. Not that I’m counting. You don’t look much like a roughneck either.”

  The ends of her mouth turned down in something between a grimace and a pout. “Thanks,” she said. Cole figured her for smarter than she was letting on. She was alive in the moment, anyway, not on autopilot like most of the women in the room.

  The dj played a new song, one that Cole recognized. “Six Days on the Road,” Dave Dudley.

  “Do you dance?” Corrina asked.

  “Not like this,” he said.

  She grabbed his hand and stood up. “First time for everything. It’s not that hard.”

  “Go get ’er, college boy!” Donald called as Cole stood up. Torn between lust and the terror of humiliating himself, he let himself get drawn toward the dance floor.

  She leaned in and talked into his ear. “Right hand here, hold my hand here with your left. Start on your left foot and just walk.” She timed her words to the music. “Left-right-left. Right. Left-right-left.” The floor was only half full. She pulled him into an opening and counted him in.

  Cole did as he was told. In a few seconds he got the feel of it and tried to smooth it out, to not lift his feet so high. The song was not that fast and he could feel the beat. “Not bad,” she said. “When I say ‘now,’ lift your left hand. Now.”

  He lifted his hand and she spun around twice. Watching her made him lose the rhythm, but when she was facing him again she was already mouthing the steps.

  A few seconds later she picked his right hand off her shoulder and put it into her own right hand and turned herself one and a half times. Now her back was to him and she was wiggling the fingers of her left hand. Cole picked it up and they danced side by side, the length of her left upper arm pressing against his chest and abdomen, her hat poking him in the shoulder.

  Chanting the steps under his breath, Cole watched the other leaders around him, and when she turned again, he changed hands on his own and got a big smile for it. He waited a few beats, then lifted his left hand and gave her a push with the right.

  “I like the initiative,” she said. “A little gentler next time, and wait for the second slow step.”

  They made it through the rest of the song without anyone getting hurt, and she said, “There. That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

  “No,” he said. “But you did everything.”

  “That’s okay, as long as you let me. You didn’t fight me, and that’s a good thing.”

  The dj said, “And now a slow one for Corrina. How you doing, sugar?”

  She blew an exaggerated kiss to the dj and then said to Cole, “Now you get your reward.”

  The dj played Eddy Arnold’s “Make the World Go Away.” This, Cole knew how to do. Corrina took her hat off and let it dangle from her left hand where it rested on his shoulder. She moved in until she was brushing gently against him, and Cole didn’t pull her any closer than that. He couldn’t remember why he’d disliked country music. The violins overflowed with emotion and the piano notes rang sweet and true. He swayed in place during the clean breaks at the start of every verse, where he could feel the breath move in and out of her.

  By the time the song ended he’d lost all sense of time and space. “Maybe,” he said, “we could, uh…”

  “Yes?” She looked pleased with herself.

  “Get a breath of fresh air? Talk for a minute without having to shout?”

  She put her hat on. “All right.”

  As he walked toward the front door, he felt like every man in the room was watching him. In fact, he thought, they probably were.

  The outside air was hot, but it moved around and it smelled of pine trees. A haze softened the stars and crickets creaked in the distance.

  “New boots?” she asked.

  “Nah, I’ve had ’em nearly four hours now. How old are you, anyway?”

  “You should know better than to ask a lady her age.”

  “It’s important. I’m trying to figure out if I should try to kiss you or not.”

  “If you have to ask, the answer is definitely ‘no.’”

  “What do you do, then? Maybe I can get a hint from your occupational status.”

  “I, it would seem, am a year ahead of you. I graduated from Robert E. Lee High School last month and am currently at loose ends. Living with my mama and hoping to get accepted into vista in the fall.”

  “vista?”

  “It’s like a domestic Peace Corps. I will be helping to fight the President’s War on Poverty, though I am not far from that state myself. My mama can’t afford to send me to college and I desperately need to get out of this place.”

  “I’m going to make a wild guess that your yearbook lists Drama Club under your activities.”

  “Why, however did you deduce that?” Her Deep South accent was credible. “Blanche DuBois in Streetcar, Ado Annie in Oklahoma.”

  “The girl who can’t say no,” Cole said. “I like you better by the minute.”

  They had arrived at Jerry’s Falcon. The doors proved to be locked.

  “Yours?” Corrina asked.

  “Jerry’s. We can sit on the hood and I can take a load off these boots.”

  “Can’t live with ’em, can’t two-step without ’em.” She hopped up beside him.

  He kissed her. Nothing fancy, and she kissed him back the same way, lips parted and soft. “Not bad,” she said, when he finished. He put his arms around her and kissed her some more. He tried a little tongue and she responded, and he thought, is this finally going to be it? Here in the middle of the parking lot? But when he put a hand on her breast, she gently removed it and said, “Easy, college boy. No paw prints on the clean shirt.”

  “I could help you out of it,” he said.

  She turned her mouth down again. “I don’t think so. Our acquaintance is not even as old as your boots, and your boots ain’t half broke-in yet.”

  He made to kiss her again and she wriggled free. “I think we better work on those boots some more. Two more dances, then you go home and get them off before your feet swell up to where you have to sleep in them.”

  *

  Cole ended up with her phone number and a vague promise to see him again the next Saturday. “There’s a two-step lesson at seven,” she said.

  “Will you be there?”

  “I don’t need lessons,” she said.

  On the drive to the Tyler Motor Inn he pressed for information. “How do you guys know her?”

  “Everybody knows Corrina,” Jerry said.

  “Did either of you guys ever… you know.”

  “Fuck her?” Donald said. “In my dreams. If Jerry says he did, he’s lying.” All that beer had left Jerry contented and Donald irritable.

  “As far as my personal experience goes,” Jerry said, “she could be all flirt and no
follow-through.” He caught Cole’s eye in the rear-view mirror. “I surely doubt it, though.”

  The boots were in fact a problem, and by the time he got the first one off he was afraid he might have done permanent damage to his foot in the process. He wrenched the other one off anyway. Then, after relieving the terrible pressure of his desire, he was awake for another hour calming down. It didn’t help that the sound of highly vocal sex was coming through the thin plywood wall.

  He tried Corrina’s number throughout the day on Sunday. Between calls he practiced two-step and guitar, and walked in his new boots to the Silver Spoon Café—inevitably the Greasy Spoon to Donald and Jerry—for a late breakfast and then for an early supper. He finally caught her at 8:30. She seemed happy enough to hear from him. They were on the phone for close to an hour, talking about Shakespeare and country music and growing up in Tyler, Texas. Cole mostly listened.

  At the end she told him he was “sweet” and said she would maybe see him on Saturday.

  “Say you’ll see me for sure on Saturday, so I can go to sleep happy.”

  “Maybe for sure,” she said. “Good night, college boy.”

  *

  Drummer number three was named Gary Travis, and Alex took a dislike to him at first sight. He was five-ten, skinny, and had his black hair slicked back in a style at least five years out of date. He wore khaki pants instead of jeans and a Madras shirt with a button-down collar.

  He was Mike Moss’s idea. Mike didn’t know much about him beyond the fact that he played with the Richardson High Band. Mike had run into him at Preston Record Center after drummers one and two had washed out, and asked if he played rock. He’d shrugged and said, “Sure. Nothing much to it.”

  He had the smallest drum set Alex had ever seen, the bass drum not much bigger than the last drummer’s floor tom. He’d spread a rug on the floor of Alex’s garage before setting up, and he spent more time tuning his heads than he had putting the hardware together, holding his left stick in the crook of his thumb, jazz-style.

  When he was ready, Alex handed him the song list and said, “The ones with the checkmarks we’ve worked on at least enough to get through.” He’d already explained, on their initial phone call, about Cole.

  Gary glanced over the list and said, “Why don’t we start with ‘Shake’? That’ll give you a taste of what I can do.”

  They had already tuned Alex’s bass and Mike’s guitar to his Vox Continental organ. “Go ahead and count it off,” Alex said, thinking, this shouldn’t take long.

  “Animals or Sam Cooke?”

  The Animals version was the only one Alex knew. He looked at Mike, who said, “Uh, what’s the difference?”

  “Animals is faster. The drums are more interesting in the Cooke version.”

  Smart ass, Alex thought. “Cooke, then.”

  It took about five seconds for Alex to change his mind. Instead of playing through on the hi-hat and snare like the Animals drummer did, Gary played the bass line on his tom-toms. It wasn’t fancy, no more than single notes in perfect time. Instead of driving, it swung. On the verses, that jazzy left hand hit with snap and authority. By the end of the song, Alex was wondering what they could offer him to get him to stay.

  “On the Cooke version,” Gary said, “it’s just the drums the first time through. Bass and drums the second time, add guitar for the third, and on the last one he’s got horns. I guess that’s where your lead player would come in.”

  Maybe, Alex thought, putting up with Gary’s shit was a high enough price to pay. “Let’s try it again,” he said.

  Alex called “Look through Any Window” next because The Hollies had the best drummer in the business and Alex knew what the part should sound like. Gary counted it off and played a credible version, simpler here and there, always with the right feel, solid on the two and four.

  Mike said, “I thought you said you’d never played in a rock band before.”

  “Never have,” he said. “I listen to this stuff all day and night, though. This is cool. Can we do another one?”

  They played for an hour, then went in the house for Cokes. “You’re a secret weapon, man,” Alex told him. “I would kill to have you in this band. I don’t know if we’re good enough for you.”

  “Depends on the lead player, I guess,” Gary said. “You guys can both really sing, and I can’t sing for doodley-squat.”

  “He can sing, too,” Alex said. “We can do We Five, we can do Byrds, Beatles, everything.”

  Gary looked through the set list and said, “Okay, you’ve got ‘Sloopy’ on here, of course, but have you ever heard the original?”

  “Original?” Alex said.

  “It’s a cover of ‘My Girl Sloopy’ by a colored group called The Vibrations. I brought a few records with me, if you want to hear it.”

  Alex reminded himself how good the guy’s drumming was and bit back his irritation. “Yeah, sure, why not?”

  In Alex’s room, Gary took the lid off a cardboard pattern box from So-Fro Fabrics and pulled out a single on the red-and-black Atlantic label. Alex dropped the needle on it.

  You could tell it was the same song, though the feel was different in the same way that Gary’s version of “Shake” was different, that swing again, and much more. Conga drums rattled in the foreground and a cheesy organ fought to be heard in the back. Horns came in every now and then to kick everything in the ass. Through it all, a live audience shrieked and laughed and applauded.

  Alex liked R&B the same as everybody did. Motown, Wilson Pickett, the Isleys, Chuck Berry, they were all on the song list. This was different, raw, sweaty, loose. It evoked a world of dark, gyrating women, spilled whiskey, and flashing razors that was completely alien to Alex’s privileged existence, as alluring as it was frightening. “Where did you get this?” he said.

  “I went to England with my folks last summer,” Gary said. “The kids over there were crazy for American music. They kept asking me about all these people I’d never heard of, Arthur Alexander, Don Covay, Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland. They thought I was a moron not to know about this stuff that was right under my nose. So when I got back I started going to Goodwill and places like that, looking for old records. Here, listen to this.”

  He handed Alex another Atlantic single, Don Covay singing “Mercy Mercy,” which the Stones had covered. After that, Doris Troy’s “Just One Look.” “Hear that rhythm?” Gary said. “That backbeat, one and two and? That’s some kind of calypso thing out of Jamaica. The Hollies toned it down and sped it up, so it doesn’t slam you in the gut like this does.”

  Alex was feverish. Suddenly, all of rock music looked like a paint-by-numbers imitation of something primal and vital and authentic, something Alex had no claim to because he was too light-skinned, too suburban, too rich. He felt like a phony for trying to start a band at all.

  “Can I?” he said, pointing to the So-Fro box. Gary nodded and Alex slid out one record after another and eased it back, each in its paper sleeve with a hole for the label, each label bearing a name that at best he’d heard mentioned somewhere. “I need to…” Words failed him. “I have to…”

  Gary looked at his watch. “I was going to hit a few stores this afternoon. You can come along if you like. I can point you to some stuff.”

  They both looked at Mike. “I have to get home,” Mike said. “You guys go ahead.”

  “Yeah,” Alex told Gary. “I would dig that.”

  *

  As the months slipped by, Dave became increasingly desperate to find the act that would launch his production career. He worried that the boom was over already. Early in the year, Jake had recorded the Charlatans in one of the few decent studios in San Francisco, Coast Recorders on Folsum Street, and failed to get anything worthy of a record contract. They were not impressive as musicians, Jake said, couldn’t agree on a sound or a direction, and were tense and wooden in the studio.

  Meanwhile, trouble was brewing in the Spoonful. John had fallen for a woman who’d been wi
th Zal first, and Zal, who had difficulty with the line between teasing and harassment, would not let him forget it.

  Dave knew that side of Zal well. Late one night, as the two of them stood on 52nd Street outside the Columbia studios service elevator, waiting for a cab, Zal had said, “Your real name’s not Dave Fisher. You’re one of the tribe.” Dave had told him the story, and Zal had called him Fischel ever since, usually in a mocking falsetto voice. Maybe it was all in good fun, though when it came from Zalman Yanovsky, who had never tried to hide his identity, who had lived on a kibbutz in Israel, for God’s sake, it turned into an accusation that twisted Dave with shame, to Zal’s never-ending delight.

  Then, on May 19, after a gig in Berkeley, Zal and Steve had driven over to Pacific Heights and bought a couple of lids from Bill Love of the Committee. Coming back, they’d attracted the attention of the cops with some crazy driving and ended up in jail. Zal, being a Canadian citizen, faced deportation and a permanent ban on reentering the US.

  Nobody in band circles was talking about it. Dave suspected, without knowing any details, that they’d made some kind of deal with the cops. He only felt it as one more source of tension when they cut “Summer in the City,” even as he started to come into his own in the studio, miking a garbage can and sending it through the speakers in the stairwell to get the boom for the opening, using the stairwell echo on Joe’s snare, recording car horns on the street, making his mark on the record.

  He’d put the word out among the local studio musicians that he was looking for an act to produce, and after a few bum steers, a sax player from Jersey told him about some Bayonne guys called the Meteors, real pros, supposedly. So on a Friday in late July he took a bus all the way down to Asbury Park to hear them play a place called Mrs. Jay’s Beer Garden.