Tell was a shy man and didn't make friends easily. In high school a quirk of fate had put him up on stage with a guitar in his hands-the last place he ever expected to be. The bassist of a group called The Satin Saturns fell ill with salmonella the day before a well-paying gig. The lead guitarist, who was also in the school band, knew John Tell could play both bass and rhythm. This lead guitarist was big and violent. John Tell was small and breakable. Offered a choice between playing the ill bassist's instrument and having it rammed up his ass to the fifth fret went a long way toward breaking down his horror of playing in front of a large audience.
But by the end of the third song, he was no longer frightened. By the end of the first set he knew he was home. Years after that first gig, Tell heard a story about Bill Wynian, bassist of The Rolling Stones. According to the story, Wyman actually fell asleep during a performance - not in some tiny club, mind you, but a huge hall-and fell from the stage, breaking his collarbone. Tell supposed lots of people either laughed at that story or assumed Wyman had been on something, but Tell guessed it was true. Bassists, he had discovered, are the invisible men of the rock world. There were exceptions - Paul McCartney, for one - but they only proved the rule.
Perhaps because of the job's very lack of glamor, there was a chronic shortage of bass players. When The Satin Saturns broke up a month later (the lead guitarist and the rhythm guitarist had had a fist-fight), Tell joined a band formed by the Saturns' rhythm man (at their first rehearsal he still had a large purple shiner), and his life's course was chosen, as simply and quietly as that.
Playing in the band, not just at the party but making the party happen-Tell liked that. You were up in front, admired, idolized almost, and yet invisible. Sometimes you had to sing a little back-up, but nobody expected you to make a speech or anything. He lived that life, parttime student and full-time band gypsy, for ten years or so. He drifted into session work in New York, began fooling with the boards, and eventually discovered he was a little better-and even more invisible-on the other side of the glass window. During all that time he had made one good friend: Paul Janning. Nor was Georgie Ronkler so different from him, he realized following what happened on that Friday night.
He and Paul were having a drink or two at one of the back tables in McManus's Pub, talking about the mix, the biz, the Mets, whatever, when all of a sudden Janning's right hand was under the table and gently squeezing Tell's crotch.
Tell moved away so violently that the candle in the center of the table fell over and Janning's glass of wine spilled. A waiter came over and righted the candle before it could scorch the tablecloth. Then he left. Tell stared at Janning, his eyes wide and shocked.
'I'm sorry,' Janning said, and he did look sorry ... but he also looked unperturbed.
'Jesus Christ, Paul!' It was all he could think of to say, and it sounded hopelessly inadequate.
'I thought you were ready, that's all,' Janning said. 'If I hadn't, I suppose I would have been more subtle. It's just that I've wanted you for quite a while now.'
'Ready?' Tell repeated. 'Ready? What do you mean? Ready for what?'
'To come out. To admit it to yourself and come out.'
'I'm not that way,' Tell said, but his heart was pounding very fast. Part of it was outrage, part was fear of the implacable certainty he saw in Janning's eyes, most of it was dismay. What Janning had done shut him out. It also shut his mouth, but for the time being that was very much secondary.
'Let's let it go, shall we? Let's just order and make up our minds that it never happened.' Until you want it to, those implacable eyes added.
Oh it happened, all right, Tell wanted to say, but that hand-the one that had been there all his life-was across his mouth. Don't say what you shouldn't say, this is a job, a good job, you need that Daltrey tape in your portfolio even more than you need the next two weeks' salary. Be careful, John.
But that wasn't all of it. That was the small of it. The fact was that his mouth closed. It always had. It snapped shut like a bear-trap, a bear-trap with rusty implacable jaws, with all his heart below those interlocked teeth and all his head above. That was the tall of it.
'All right,' he said, 'it never happened.'
Tell slept badly that night, and what sleep he did get was haunted by bad dreams: one of Janning groping him in McManus's was followed by one of the sneakers under the stall door, only in this one Tell opened it and saw Paul Janning sitting there, a corpse with a huge peeling hard-on sticking up from the thatch of his pubic hair like an exclamation point. The mouth of this corpse dropped open with an audible creak. 'That's right; I knew you were ready,' it said on a puff of greenly rotten air, and Tell woke himself up by tumbling onto the floor in a tangle of coverlet. It was four in the morning. The first touches of light were just creeping through the chinks between the buildings outside his window. He dressed and sat smoking one cigarette after another until it was time to go to work.
Around eleven o'clock on that Saturday-they were working six-day weeks to make Daltrey's deadline-Tell went into the third floor bathroom to urinate. He stood just inside the door, rubbing his temples, and then looked around at the stalls.
He couldn't see. The angle was wrong.
Then never mind! Fuck it! Take your piss and get out of here!
He walked slowly over to one of the urinals and unzipped.
It took a long time to get going.
On his way out he paused again, head cocked, and then walked slowly around into the stall area just far enough so he could see under the door of the first stall.
The dirty white sneakers were still there. The building which used to be known as Music City was almost completely empty, Saturday morning empty, but the sneakers were still there.
Tell's eyes fixed upon a fly just outside the stall. He watched with an empty sort of avidity as it crawled beneath the stall door and onto one of the sneakers. There it stopped, and simply fell dead. It tumbled into the growing pile around the sneakers. Tell saw with no surprise at all (none that he felt, anyway) that among the flies was a large cockroach, lying on its back like a turtle.
He left in large painless strides, and his progress back to the studios seemed most peculiar; it was as if, instead of walking, the building was flowing past him, around him, like river-rapids around a rock.
