Whale Music (23 page)

Then there came—it was inevitable—that sad day when the Drugs and the concept of Free Love mixed in a horrible fashion, and I’m afraid that a ten-year-old girl paid a very high price for Fred Head’s confusion. Kenneth Sexstone worked his wonders, the story was kept off the front pages, Freddy was quietly led away. But when the next issue of
Skylark
came out, Fred’s fat face—rouged and war-painted, I shudder to think of some of the things he got into—was on the cover.

The article concentrated on Fred Head’s problems and his incarceration, but the rest of us didn’t get off lightly. The story catalogued Danny’s run-ins with the law, the article followed Sally Goneau from leather bar to leather bar, and, boy, the vulture of journalism feasted on me, the fat recluse in his mansion, the windows boarded-up, the door never opened. The only one who came off at all well was Monty Mann, who was too busy being a Babboo Nass Fazoovian to get into any trouble. Also, it has long been a suspicion of mine that it was Monty who fed all this information to that kite Geddy Cole.

Please don’t get me wrong. I think all that Free Love stuff ultimately did some good. I mean, there are tax auditors out there who are a little less zealous to have people drawn-and-quartered, and this is because they were hippies,
because they attended love-ins and sunburnt their dinkies. But there are also some casualties, as in any revolution, and one of them is currently sitting at my kitchen table, making a big production out of folding his hands together. I wish Claire was here. Claire, I think, could make this fellow relax, she would tap him on his flabby shoulder, say, “How’s it going, man?” and I think Fred would unclench his teeth, I think he might even smile.

“Boy,” I mutter, “do I have problems.”

Fred makes no response. I expected none. He lifts up the napkin, seems surprised to see a half-eaten jelly-filled there.

“Yes,” I persist. “I lacked foresight, recorded a melody line on one track, and now I want it to be stereo, and what am I to do?”

Fred lowers his head. He links his fingers together, he is very proud of this dexterous ability. I am starting to think this is a lost cause, but then Fred mutters, “Bounce.”

“Ah! Well you may say bounce, but Fred, I have left myself no tracks.”

“Nyuk.”

“Freddy?” I start to get excited. “Did you just go
nyuk?”

“Nyuk-nyuk.”

“What is it?”

“Shunt frequencies.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Like at a train station. Reroute the frequencies. Eight hundred megahertz, track four. Sixteen hundred, track nine. Get another machine to use as a switcher. Choo-choo. Shunt frequencies, you get a free track. All the way to Alaska. One free track, bouncy-bounce, split the signal from the melody line, pan left, pan right, stereophonic.
Tres facile.”

“Now that’s a very good—”

“Desmond!”

“Yes, Fred?”

“Why are you sad?” Freaky Fred says all this overloud, he is bellowing in the kitchen.

“I’m not sad, Freddy.”

“Oh. Why are you unhappy?”

“I … I miss someone.”

“Did you miss me?”

“Yes. Yes, I did.”

“Do you want to go shunt frequencies now?”

And in the music room Fred Head calmly assumes the chair behind the console. It has been some years since he’s done this sort of thing, and technology has advanced in leaps and bounds. The concept of digital recording, for example, was sci-fi stuff when Freddy went away. He doesn’t seem at all daunted, though. Fred knows machines. The computer behaves towards Fred like a friendly puppy, it leaps up and licks his face. Fred spends a few minutes deciphering its language and then programs in some basic information about noise. He picks up the various black boxes, compressors, expanders, etc., he looks at their circuit board diagrams and nods. It is only a short while before Fred is ready. He rubs his hands together, glances at me (I think I see a small smile buried underneath his beard), Fred reaches over and pushes the
PLAY
button on the big machine.

He listens to the “Song of Congregation”. Fred always did that, concentrating very hard on the first play-through, touching exactly nothing on the board, just hearing the sounds as they were recorded. The Yamaha 666 howls at highest pitch, the control room shakes with the Beast’s fury.

When the song is finished, Freaky Fred Head turns his head. He takes off his sunglasses, stares at me and says something he’s never said before, not in all the time the two of us recorded gold and platinum records, things that sold mega-units to the Hutterites. Fred says, “I think it’s a hit.”

Hits, hits, hits. We had an unprecedented string of the buggers. I was hugely famous, I was inconceivably wealthy, I upped the dosages, I drank mightily, I did some things I’d just as soon not mention.

One morning I woke up, crawled to the bathroom, had a sip of water and threw up. This is indicative of poor shape, when your body refuses to deal with H
₂
O. Sicker still was the old spirit, do you know the feeling, you can’t walk within a mile of railway tracks or freeways for fear that your soul will summon its last reserves and hurl your carcass towards oblivion? Fay was God only knows where, even her icy glares and fierce recriminations would have comforted me somewhat.

Monty Mann entered the bathroom. Monty later claimed that he was drawn to my house, to the washroom, by some urgent psychic beckoning.
I
believe he was drawn by some urgent need to drain his bladder. At any rate, he knelt beside me, he was kind enough to hold me, after a while I began to feel semihuman, at which I point I dipped into the pharmaceuticals, and in no time I was feeling fairly well. Monty, sensing my general despondency, insisted that I accompany him and his girlfriend Starflower to a lecture that evening. By then I was feeling well enough to have started drinking again, but for some reason this didn’t reinforce my normal need for aloneness. I agreed.

We picked up Starflower who, I have to tell you, eclipsed me in the weirded-out department. Starflower wore a chiffon
dress and a baffled expression. This is what happened when the debs were given bad drugs—girls with names like Muffy Seton-Beaton dropped acid, adopted astronomical and/or botanical monikers and lost the faculty of intelligent speech.

We drove to a huge stadium. Talk about your drug casualties, the psychically damaged, there were tens of thousands of us, all there to hear our spiritual leader, the King of the Fritzed, Babboo Nass Fazoo.

Inside the stadium hung a huge representation of the Babboo’s blissful visage. It was an idealized portrait, but it still made me shudder, which gives you some notion of how ugly the Babboo could be at close quarters. I’ll tell you what to do, make one of those hand puppets, curl your fingers and stick your thumb through so it forms a mouth. If you own an old, wrinkled hand this will work particularly well. All right, now imagine hair on this hand, grey greasy hair of a length of two-plus feet (subtract a mangy baldspot) and you have some idea of the appearance of Babboo Nass Fazoo. He came onto the stage (riding a great satin pillow carried by eight henchmen) gesticulating wildly. People rushed forward to lay flowers at his gnarly feet.

The Babboo began to speak, in a voice like a chipmunk being throttled. “Life is a powl of zoob,” he began, then he told us about breathing exercises, he identified a spot about the size of a dime on one’s palm that was the site of “energedig imbulzes,” he turned quite wiggy for a bit, seeming to imply that if we weren’t having sexual intercourse for three days straight we weren’t doing it right. That’s the bit that hooked Monty, I’m sure of it. I have no such easy excuse. Babboo Nass Fazoo seemed to know where one could purchase peace of mind, and I dearly wanted some.

The next night I dragged Danny down to the stadium. I think what got him was the breathing exercises. The Babboo snapped his fingers and approximately twenty-three thousand, four hundred and sixty two pert breasts stiffened. Dan became quite the zealot, and was in large part responsible for the
Babboo’s tremendous popularity. Danny was a good walking advertisement for it, he stopped drinking, his face acquired this robust rosiness, his dark eyes glistened with inner knowledge, a cherubic grin bloomed across his face.

Sal Goneau and Dewey Moore were persuaded. Dewey’s first marriage had just failed, he was eager for any sort of distraction. Sal was, well for god’s sake, how can I put this, Sal was
spiritual
. I know it’s hard to believe in this day and age, but there you have it.

We all five flew to India to study with the Babboo. Our next record album,
At Play in the Fields of the Lord
, was dedicated to him, the songs all espoused the Babboo Nass Fazoovian philosophy.

The record was a whimpering dog, it sucked like piglets at the teat, I am well and truly ashamed.

The “Song of Congregation” is like a searchlight in an inky sky, forgive me my immodesty, it is largely the work of Freaky Fred Head at any rate, he has worked on the music like a masseur, he has loosened the little knots, he has toned and conditioned.

I would be happy, I would be blissfully happy, except that there is no sign of Claire.

How do you figure a guy like Danny? I mean, really. You must picture the scene. There we are in India, all of us, our wives and girlfriends. Even Fay came briefly, although she decided that the Indian sun was bad for her complexion. The Jamaican sun,
the French Rivieran sun, those suns were acceptable, but the sun that hovered over India, it was all wrong. Also down in India were the Beatles. I was somewhat impressed with George Harrison because he persisted in his sitar studies even when the master Ravi Shankar stated publicly that it would be some years before George learned to
hold
the thing. A little-known bit of trivia: Monty Mann took up the sitar, Ravi Shankar said that he would
never
learn how to hold it.

It was an idyllic existence there in India. We meditated, made music, went on long walks. We dressed in robes when we dressed at all, what with the human body being like a bowl of soup.

So who would have thought that such Elysian surroundings would wake the slumbering Stud E. Baker?

I first became aware of Baker’s re-emergence while being tutored by the Babboo Nass Fazoo. The Babboo would give you private tutelage if he thought you were (a) capable of true enlightenment and (b) revoltingly moneyed. He would lead you down to a stagnant pond, point to the shade of a tree and giggle, his lackies would arrive with pillows, bare-breasted women would come bearing fans like garden rakes, children would rush forward with refreshment, dewy fruit and the Babboo’s favourite beverage, Labatt’s 50, a beer he had flown in by the Boeing 747-load. The Babboo would expound his philosophy and giggle, as if he himself could not believe that anyone was actually buying this drivel.

I had seen Daniel the day before, wandering around the site dressed in a snow-white robe. His face was ruddy from the sun but possessed of a tranquillity that I could scarcely credit. Beside him walked (floated, more like it) a naked woman. Her breasts were large, mother-of-pearl, traces of vein shining lightly. Daniel didn’t seem to notice. He was holding a blade of grass in front of his face, concentrating on the symmetry. He was approaching true holiness, I’m sure that cow-patties would have jumped out of his way had he, in his contemplative state, come close to treading through them.

I felt happy for Danny and thoroughly ashamed of myself. For one thing, I wasn’t buying any of the Babboo’s malarky. I know, I know, I was won over by the lecture back in California, I admit that for a while I was quite boringly het-up about the whole thing, a rabid proselyte, but my enthusiasm waned. I was there with him only because I enjoyed the atmosphere, the tranquillity, I was there because we didn’t tell Kenneth Sexstone where we were going, ha ha! Babboo Nass Fazoo was very down on the use of drugs (“drupping rappit-belledz indo the powl of zoob”), but I was ingesting them by the handful, me and (this is in Geddy Cole’s mean-spirited little publication anyway, it’s not like I’m divulging secrets) Johnny Lennon. John and I would also get into the booze a little bit, that fellow could put it away, if Fate had allowed John an old age, I’m sure he would have been one of those crimson-faced, blossomed-nosed gits who sits around the nobby all day picking fights with the publican. “ ’Ere,” he’d growl, “that weerent
us
. It weer the Dave Clahrk Foive!”