The Shadow Of Your Smile Piano Sheet

[Jesper Sahu]

James Barbour has published several other stories with Weber Studies. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University in 1989, where he taught for several years. His stories have appeared in Cimarron Review, Atlanta Review, Puerto Del Sol, American Literary Review, and others. He currently works as a fencing instructor in Phoenix. See other work by James Barbour published in Weber Studies: Vol. 13.2, Vol. 15.2, and Vol. 17.1.

My ears are ringing and damp from the fluid my latest doctor had dripped into them, as I make that long curve on Sunset, swing-ing by the Capitol Records building, before the road drops down among the aggressive architecture of newer buildings on the Strip. Sunset had been the main artery of my ambitions when I first tried to find work among the recording studios that used to be landmarks here. There are fewer of them now; it's a Darwinian struggle for space among the stripper bars, boutique restaurants, tattoo parlors and cell-phone stores. I find most of my work in industrial parks off the freeways, north and south of Hollywood.

I delivered my latest adventure in technical writing in Culver City, then confused another ear specialist for an hour. It's too late for lunch and too early to go home. I had RRB playing, and was enjoying the sparse traffic when I got the call. At first I thought it was my ears still buzzing from the audiometers and tuning forks, but I pulled into a strip mall parking lot and unfolded my phone. Driving under the influence of a cell phone isn't yet a crime, but it's just too LA to take a call in traffic.

Bad ears and all, I could tell he was worried, and in a hurry, or some of both. I wonder if there was trouble with the liner notes I'd re-written for a rap group called "Ded II Lif." They were a bunch of Stanford econ majors, who didn't need spread sheets to tell them that the salaries of market analysts and "gangstas" didn't merit comparison, and since the Street wasn't hiring anyway, they'd become recording artists. Their live performances sold well, but the recordings hadn't taken off in a way that the money-crunchers at Redux wanted, so they brought me to rewrite the lyrics. I got rid of half of the punctuation and figurative language, as references to Keats and Yeats just aren't "hood" enough. They were now booming and thumping their way up Billboard's charts.

Milt met me in the lobby, indicating he really is worried about something. He escorts me past all the leather and denim in the reception area, then takes me in the private elevator to the suits on the upper floors, where all the real work gets done. He's talking my ear off through the whole perambulation, how I'd done a bang-up job with the "boyz," though I doubt he intended the pun, etcetera, etcetera.

OK: quiet and perfect, I think, as he opens a conference room door. Looking past Milt's shoulder, I see a charcoal-suited shadow with matching tinted glasses and a suntan, in a volleyball T-shirt. Then with a jolt I realize it's Lee Baines reaching for a chocolate-covered donut, and Todd Hitchman saying in his bored voice, "When the hell do we get our cappuccinos?"

I didn't start breathing again until the coffee arrived. Milt settled himself into a leather chair with a middle-aged sigh, though he is, at a stretch, twenty-nine. Then each of the band members shake my hand, while I stand there, timid as Moses introducing himself on Mount Sinai.

The pause function on a CD player doesn't break or stretch the tape, because there isn't one, and it doesn't drop any notes when the reels re-engage. You can stop for hours, days even, and then push the button, and the song starts up at exactly the spot you'd stopped. Time does this sometimes too, as it did when I saw Randy reach for the last donut. Just before I slid into a chair, something in my mind hit the pause button.

I grew up in Riverside County, so Riverside Rhythm and Blues was my local sound, the background music of my life, which spoke of the desert light and the ugly yellow-brown hills where I grew up. Looking up from the sprawling cul-de-sacs, where no houses were yet built, I remember seeing the ridges scarred with gypsum mines, and roads to even newer developments among the serried ranks of hills backing up into the mountains that separated us from the beach towns, where none of our parents made enough to live.

RRB put the South in Southern California. Their parents and our parents moved from Jefferson County, Georgia, or Seminole County in Oklahoma to work in the airplane plants, or be carpenters in the ranch-style, tract developments. The Beachboy culture, from over west, in Orange County or LA, thought we were hicks because a lot of us still had the twang. We didn't say "dude," much less surf. Our hair was funny, and nobody drove a convertible.

My wife Jenny and I got away. Now we live in bohemian North Hollywood, where our yuppie neighbors would scarcely guess we grew up east of Ontario. We've missed the divorce disease, which affects most everyone in LA, and even broke up our band years back. But RRB is playing at the high school reunions, where we see the people we used to know, and count all the busted marriages.

Somebody has hit the "play" button. I am shaking hands with Riverside Rhythm and Blues, which I hadn't expected to do this side of a "Cool Day in Palm Desert." And it happens the way it does dozens of times a day, one of their lyrics popping into my head and out of my mouth, often as not, their songs CCCC providing me the vocabulary for my toiling writer's mind.

"Later, kid," Milt says, punching a lighted button on his phone bank. And I wonder what grade Milt was in the year RRB brought out their first single. We all hear a dial tone; then Milt hangs up and an awkward silence grows as Randy finishes his donut, Lee stares a hole in the table, and Todd slurps and blows on his coffee.

For a moment I thought my ears were tricking me. Todd folds his arms and says, "This will never work," and Randy tosses his long, blue-streaked hair back, and murmurs, "I've got a gig in an hour." Moving fast for such a big man, he bounces out of his chair, swings the door open, and leaves the meeting.

"We never put it on our concert program," Lee explains, pushing back his charcoal-tinted glasses. "It was always a spirit-of-the moment sort of thing, like `American Woman' at Woodstock. That's why none of us wrote it down."

I sure am. I see it there before me: "The Vibe," one of the great unknowns of rock-trivia, would have to fall at my hand. That song had fueled more half-way stoned after-dinner arguments than any other I could remember. My wife and I still talk about it, sleepless nights in bed. My hands start to shake. I clamp down on my pen.

They were laughing before I finished, Lee laughing particularly hard. "Donny single-handedly invented the word `whatever'," he says, wiping tears and nostalgia from his eyes. "I don't know who wrote the song, but it wasn't him."

"So that's the job," Milt says, concluding the meeting with incubating hand shakes all around; then he backs out of our presence, a shortish, nervous man in a loud suit. I know he doesn't really appreciate exactly who RRB had been, but his antennae were in touch with the awe wave. Writing the checks will do that for you; cashing them will do it even more.

We ride south on the PCH in Lee's jet black stretch limousine, which is nearly as long as my house, and better decorated. It is miles out of my way, but I don't care. The moon-roof casts a harsh light across Lee's eroded face. He'd lost his wife a year before to cancer, and lines, which his tinted glasses only partly conceal, scrawl across his face twenty years ahead of their time. Back in the heyday of the group, Lee picked up groupies the way a salesman eats peanuts on a commuter jet. He joined the beautiful people by marriage, but the wedding to his wife Laura had been a love match, and one that lasted, a rarity in the rock world that all us out in fan-land observed carefully, his faithfulness a wonder that became a surrogate obsession after the demise of RRB. Living without his wife left Lee a stark man.

"Yeah, well, keeping Donny away from his drug-du-jour was full-time employment. He had to stay awake to come in for the vocal reprise near the end. Then there are those long solos, where the guit-tar moves the song's story forward."

An SUV careens past us, shaking the firmament with a rap song, amplified to concussive strength. Deep inside I begged forgiveness for contributing to the problem, by ghost writing for Ded II Lif. We can't hear anything until the SUV is a quarter mile away.

"Good," he says, sounding pleased, "keep her happy." It is strange, but with those three words, I sense the coda to his own lost symphony. Then the window smoothly divides us. My reflection vanishes as the limo pulls away, leaving me standing in a suspect neighborhood, smelling the exhaust fumes, and Korean spices, trying not to notice the traces of yellow outline paint on the pavement. I hike across the intersection to a convenience market, and call a cab to make the trek back to my car at the wrong time of day, going against traffic all the way.

Married. Every once and a while I get astonished by the fact: married! It has become a normal thing somehow, but then Jenny will do something, and I feel like a teenager making out after a dance. Just yesterday, she stormed out of the shower, her black hair up in a towel and not a stitch else, to tell off a phone service salesman, looking like a pissed-off Winged Victory. And I stood there with a stupefied expression, until she hung up and noticed me breathing like an asthmatic.

Afterwards, late night, I begin to work, playing the three known recordings of "the Vibe" as loud as I can stand in the earphones. Next morning I'm back at it, kneeling in front of the speakers in my bathrobe, pressing close to try and untangle the sounds, link myself by the ear to the song.

We walk a quarter mile of Malibu's beach while Todd ticks off properties he'd bought, sold, and might buy again. Todd walks barefoot, nodding to the joggers and the regulars, his neighbors and any young women passing by.

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