“Why would he think that?”
“It’s not what he would’ve done at my age. He had to scratch and claw his way out of the gutter, as he reminds me. Then there was my mother and me to worry about.”
Payton had turned his chair to face the fish tank and was watching a school of electric-blue cichlids circle their submerged castle. “Your mother is no longer in the picture?”
“She died last November. Was carrying laundry down to our basement when she slipped. We had one of those old Philly row homes. Real narrow stairs, long fall. I didn’t find her till hours later.”
“You found her?”
“Yeah.” Clay shrugged it off. “It wasn’t great.”
“So what do you hope to do in Los Angeles?”
Clay didn’t know how to answer that. He had been so certain that Payton would lock on to the trauma of his mother’s death that the question threw him; he actually had to think about it before his mind settled on the obvious: “I want to play in a band.”
“What kind of music?”
“Oh, you know, Jimmy Buffet. Bob Marley.”
Payton grinned approvingly. “Clever. But there’s no room for pandering here.”
“I like rock in all its forms,” Clay conceded. “From Chuck Berry to Karney and the Demons.”
“Were you in a band back east?”
“Not a working one. I jammed with people, but they either didn’t have much talent or they would never show up, or they had a lot of talent and they showed up with egos as big as the Walt Whitman Bridge.”
“Welcome to the music world.”
“You play too,” Clay said.
Payton lifted his palms, as if Clay had accused him. “Alto sax. Surf rock mostly—and saying I do it part time would be flattering myself. My claim to fame was playing in a David Lynch movie. This bar scene where two characters have their hands around each other’s throats. They’re killing each other and shrieking that they love each other at the same time. And behind them on stage is a sax player blasting away—and that sax player is me.”
“Nice. And you gave all that up to sit in an office with whiny people?”
“I was only in music for the women. Sax for sex, so to speak. Three marriages later, I’ve had enough. What do you expect to get out of your music, Clay?”
“The girls are great. But for me, it’s about being heard. Music’s the universal language, right? People are moved by it. You play a fight song and they raise their fists. You croon a love ballad and they have their arms around each other. I mean, is there anything better in life than the moment before your favorite band takes the stage? The house music cuts out and the lights go down and everyone starts screaming. Thirty seconds later you’re all dancing and slamming around and singing word for word. What else does that to people? Not movies. Not paintings. Not the greatest speech ever spoken.”
Payton steepled his hands and went on fish-gazing. “So it’s love you’re after?”
“Well, like I said, the girls are nice, but—”
“Girls, bandmates, adoring fans yelling in a dark club—it all comes down to feeling loved and wanted, does it not?”
Clay thought this over. “I guess. If you want to make it sound lame.”
“Right now the desire to be loved is in overdrive for you. Given your recent tragedy.”
“My mother?” Clay groaned. “I want to play in a band to replace Mommy’s love? Come on, I thought you hated clichés?”
Payton flashed the same smile as when Clay had mentioned Jimmy Buffett. “There are some things that are constant and reliable in this world.” He opened the top of the tank and dropped a pinch of food inside. Clay watched the cichlids dart at the flakes like piranha on a cow. “It’s not a cliché that I have water in this tank, is it? Without water, there are no fish, no marine plants, no calming gurgle. The water must be constant or everything it nurtures is ruined. That’s what love is to the cycle of human emotion.”
“I bet I’m not the first client you’ve used that on.” But even as Clay snarked, Rocket Throne’s “Strangers Who Love” swam into his head. The song told the tale of Boyle’s first experience onstage—how, given his abusive parents and nomadic youth, the audience cheering him was the first time he had felt genuinely embraced. A thrill better than any earthly pill. The love they send me. Let this moment never end in me. That theme—of wanting love, of getting it or not getting; or finding it, losing it, then wanting it back—had been a staple of songwriting, Clay guessed, since cavemen were banging stones together. “It’s true, though, isn’t it? Most things in life really do come down to love. Which is scary.”
“Love is only scary when you see how far people will go to get it,” Payton replied. “And possibly that’s why your dad wants us to talk.”
On his way home, Clay stopped at the Town Center, a mall in downtown Burbank. Now that the cat was out of the bag, there was no harm in wearing a Rocket Throne shirt around the old man. He found a Hot Topic and bought the old classic design—Boyle, Roethke, and Hank Ooljee propped on gothic thrones, looking giddy and full of life as they floated off into space. Three musicians at the top of their game. Two of them already dead.
The guy who rang Clay up had so many piercings you could see “death by lightning strike” on his toe-tag. “You know, Rocco Boyle used to live in Burbank,” he said.
“I’ve heard that.”
As far as malls were concerned, Clay liked the Town Center. Along with
