Lunch With a Madman

Ch. 8 of An Evening With God

Sometimes Traynor didn’t mind being ignored, but there were nights when he had all he could do to keep from putting his guitar in its little stand, going over to their table, and baptising with their own drinks a group of people not just ignoring him, but ignoring him loudly. Not, of course, that they could have had any way of knowing what he’d given up to play ever Tuesday evening at Grisham’s. Not they had any idea how hard he worked on his songs.

Admirer of the old masters of Tin Pan Alley as he was, he didn’t just hum along with his chord changes, but composed real melodies, figuring out the chords later. And then he wrote lyrics that actually rhymed. Not for him asking his listeners to accept that time and wine (matching vowels, dissonant consonants) rhymed. Ira Gershwin wouldn’t have time-and-wined, or Oscar Hammerstein, or Cole Porter. Of the many people over the years he’d told that a false rhyme sounded to him like an out-of-tune guitar or piano, or a singer singing flat or sharp, around 90 percent had scoffed at him, but he’d never relented, and never intended to. Not for Jackie Traynor nonsensical lyrics that he airily invited listeners to interpret as they wished. Not for him subverting sense for cute rhymes, and then doing that precious, fashionable thing, when someone wondered what the hell he was on about, of inviting them to come up with their own interpretations. How lazy that was. How slovenly! No, Jackie Traynor would go to the trouble of making sense.

And here, as usual, was a half-full club with exactly one person paying attention to him as he performed, Spanish teacher Jill Montez, the latest addition to the San Rodrigo High School faculty. The most attractive thing about her was her admiration for Traynor’s songwriting and singing. There was that time 17 months before, when he got the gig, when no fewer than half a dozen of his fellow teachers had come to see him perform, but it had been a disaster. They’d been attentive through maybe half of his first set, and then begun conversing right in front of him. By the end of the set, through the last two songs of which math teacher Jimmy Guillen had guffawed loudly at something not really that funny said by Trish Thompson, the school’s sole non-lesbian girls’ PE coach, Traynor had come to want to strangle Jimmy. He’d had all he could do, when Jim told him afterward he’d thought Traynor awesome, to keep from asking what Jim was basing that assessment on, given that Jim had been preoccupied with trying to hit on Thompson. With whom, for the record, Traynor had gotten nowhere back when she’d been the latest addition to the San Rod High faculty.

Being ignored by strangers was better than being ignored by alleged friends. That realization would keep him from doing something stupid, something that would get him banished from The Coffeehouse, before evening’s end. “You can torture yourself for what’s lacking, or revel in what you possess,” Traynor had written in one of his songs. And here he was finding it almost impossible to follow his own advice.

He finished his first set with his country-styled song Ain’t Mansplainin’, in part an homage to the Gershwins’ Ain’t Misbehavin’, in other ways a wry rebuke to the sort of over-the-top feminist with whom no male could disagree without being accused of sexism. A couple members of his audience noticed that he’d replaced his guitar in its stand and gave him what might have been described as a smattering of applause if it had been louder and more extended.

Nobody stopped him on his way to the bar to say how much they’d enjoyed his singing. No one ever did. Bartender Kelli, for whom he was much too old, but after whom he’d lusted intermittently since he began doing his Tuesday nights, didn’t, as she never did, acknowledge that he’d been playing and singing. “The usual?” she asked, rather than saying, “I really liked that new song,” or something.

“Yes,” he said, “the usual.” A Suntory All-Free — that is, devoid of alcohol. He’d had a problem, but the miracle that his AA group had promised actually happened. In a few weeks, he would celebrate the ninth anniversary of his last drink. If only staying off cigarettes were half as easy. Even now, 15 months after his last Camel, he still wanted to step outside into the parking lot and fire one up.

Someone approached him, someone he hadn’t noticed in the audience. A rumpled-looking middle-aged guy who hadn’t shaved in four or five days. The broken blood vessels in his nose suggested that he was still waiting for the miracle. Baggy trousers. Black leather jacket.

A disarmingly kind smile, though. “Caught the last few songs,” he said. “Really enjoyed what I heard.”

“Kind of you,” Traynor said, wishing the guy were a pretty woman under 45. “Appreciated.”

“I hope my telling you that you remind me a little bit of Neil Young doesn’t displease you,” the guy said. “A similar kind of plaintiveness in the singing. But your songs — do you write them all yourself? — are better written than his, I’d say. I’m someone who appreciates attention to detail.”

Hey, this wasn’t so bad after all. Delight made Traynor more cordial. “Somebody noticed!” he said, grinning. “I really appreciate that…”

The guy missed his cue to tell Traynor his name, and didn’t seem to want to know Traynor’s.

“You should sell CDs at your shows. I’d have bought one. I’d have bought a few, in fact, to give to friends.”

Traynor’s delight grew. “What are you drinking?” he asked his new friend, grinning still.

His new fan ignored the question. He glanced at his watch and said, “Damn it. I’ve got somewhere I have to be, or I’d definitely stay to hear some more. Where will you be playing next?” Traynor told him Grisham’s was the only place he played, every Tuesday night.

“I guess that means I’m going to have to wait a week to hear you again,” the guy said, shaking his head. “That song of yours, Mansplainin’, I think it’s called. Man, I loved that. No CDs?”

“There was a time when I sold them,” Traynor said. He kept himself from appending “but nobody was buying them anymore, so I stopped.”

“Tell you what,” his new fan said. “How about you burn a CD or something for me of anything you’ve got recorded, and I take you to an early supper later in the week. Mexican. You like Mexican? I think San Rod’s got the highest concentration of top-notch Mex places in southern Cali.”

They met at five-thirty on Friday afternoon at Xavi’s. Traynor had burned a CD with 17 of his songs on it for the guy, whom Traynor could call Hovah or just Hove.

“Interesting name,” Traynor said. “The past tense of ‘heave’, or is it short for something?”

“Short for something,” Hove said in a way that made clear he found the subject tedious. He wanted instead to ask about the vintage of Traynor’s songs, and where they’d been recorded, and with what accompanists, if any.

Traynor could hardly have been more flattered. He told Hove about wanting to be a rock star as a teenager, and about how he’d dropped out of med school, sorely disappointing his parents, to pursue that dream. He told Hove that after decades of turning down other opportunities so he could continue to pursue it, first as a performer, and then, when he reached an age at which no record company would have signed him as an artist, as a songwriter. He talked about having finally admitted defeat to the extent of getting his teaching credential and a job teaching biology at San Rod High.

“If you have to have a day job,” Traynor said, sighing, “being a teacher might be one of the best ones. “A lot of the kids are obnoxious, of course, but at three o’clock they go home. And I can spend my summer writing songs.”

“Well,” Hove said, “you’ve written some gems. That’s for sure. In fact, I like your stuff so much that I’m going to make you an offer.”

“Don’t tell me you’re a record company talent scout,” the ever-more-flattered Traynor laughed.

“Oh, better than that. Much better. What I’m going to do, right now, while we’re sitting here, is ask you to identify three decisions in your life you most regret.”

It occurred to Traynor that he might be having lunch with a madman, and that maybe only the mad appreciated his music. He thought of asking Hove if the question might not be a little personal, and was surprised to find himself instead pondering it instead.

“Off the top of my head,” he said, “I’d say leaving medical school to try to become a rock star — my band had been offered a deal with a major label, and a tour — might have been the one I regret most. After all, if I were the most sought-after cosmetic surgeon in Beverly Hills, I could still do music in the evening, and on weekends.”

Hove nodded. “Well, the heart wants what it wants, and a young heart very often wants something an older heart wants no longer. I think you should give yourself credit for having had the courage to, you know, go for it.”

“The second thing wasn’t really a decision per se,” Traynor said. “It was more a course of action I stayed on for a couple of years.”

“I’m guessing you mean with Lisa,” Hove said.

Whoa! How on earth did this guy know anything about Lisa, Traynor’s first live-together girlfriend? Did he know she’d made Traynor feel as though he’d won the lottery, and was widely regarded as the most beautiful woman in the music business in Los Angeles, which was saying a great deal? Did he know that everyone in Traynor’s band (and probably every other band on the label whose West Coast publicist she was) had made a play for her, or that she wasn’t only beautiful, but also kind, generous, and devoted to Traynor?

As a member in good (which was to say awful) standing of the Sons of Groucho, who distrusted or even scorned those foolish enough to fail to recognize them as imposters and losers, the young Traynor had of course come to treat her disgracefully, cheating on her repeatedly. He made clear that he thought the two of them mismatched intellectually, and ridiculed her for her erotic timidity. He was a perfect asshole, and when, after almost four years, she’d had quite enough of his cruelty, she abandoned him, it nearly killed him. He begged her to give him another chance, knowing deep down that if she did, the vengeful part of him would seize the reins, and unleash cruelty of a sort Lisa hadn’t yet endured. A perfect asshole.

“Have we met?” Traynor asked Hove. “You seem to know things about me from decades ago.”

Hove dodged the question. “So if you had it to do over, you wouldn’t be a perfect asshole again?” he asked. His tone contained no trace of censure. A simple statement of fact to which Traynor would take offense only at his own peril.

Traynor responded in kind. “I so wouldn’t,” he said. “I’d really like to believe that.”

“And your third greatest source of regret”? Hove asked.

“Well, again, not a specific decision, but a course of action. The way I treated my parents. They were disappointed when I left med school — terribly disappointed. But you know what they told me?”

“I do,” Hove said. “That what they wanted most was your happiness, and that you could count on their love and support no matter what you decided.”

Again, Traynor didn’t challenge his new friend’s knowing things no one could have known. “And how did I reward them?” he said, shuddering at the memory. “By being a perfect asshole with them too.”

He swiped frantically at the tears that raced down his face, one from each eye, as Hove said, “You came to recognize that the way they’d raised you had made you the person who could treat Lisa so awfully. How could that realization not have led to resentment, Jack?”

It was the first time Hove had addressed him by name. Traynor had never confided it. “They were doing the best they knew how,” Traynor said, “the best they could do as the people their own parents had raised extremely imperfectly.”

Hove reached across the table to pat Traynor’s hand. “The years have made you wise, Jack. You should pride yourself on that. You know the saying ‘live and learn’? Do you know how many people just live? You need to give yourself credit. You need not to beat yourself up about your parents.”

“You sound like one of my shrinks,”Traynor said, keeping himself from crying by going into flippant mode. “In fact, you sound like most of them.”

It was the damnedest thing. Maybe it was the angle at which the light was streaming in through the front window now. Hove seemed somehow to be…glowing. “I don’t know whether to feel complimented or dissed,” Hove said, winking, apparently amused to hear hip hop slang coming out of his own mouth. “I do have a strong hunch, Jack, that your deciding, even if passively, not to have children belongs in your Top 3.”

“I’m not so sure it does,” Traynor said. “When I see what some of my friends have gone through with their teenagers, I feel like I may have dodged a bullet. This one buddy of mine from forever ago, his daughter committed what I found out is called vehicular suicide. Killed not only herself but a young mom and her little boy in the other car.”

Hove nodded sadly. “Rob Hedrick. Don’t imagine I don’t hold myself partly to blame for that. Took my eye off the ball, so to speak. It might be a couple of millennia before I stop feeling bad about that, assuming I ever do.”

And here Traynor had imagined he’d met weird people — schizophrenics, acid casualties, severe ADHD types — in the record business. None had come close in weirdness to this guy. Lots had made outlandish, grandiose claims, but always after having given some small indication that they had a screw or too loose. Aside from being five percent more slovenly than the most slovenly of Traynor’s pals, Hove couldn’t have seemed more normal.

What could Traynor say except, “Whatever”?

Their server came, determined there was nothing else either wanted, and presented the bill. For an uncomfortable moment, it appeared that Hove had expected Traynor to insist on paying it. But then, winking, he reached for it, and put a credit card atop the bill in its little plastic tray.

“Tell you what I’m going to do because I like your songs so much, Jack. I’m going to help you put things right with Leece.”

It occurred to Traynor that if Hove had the power to make something like that happen, he probably also had the ability to make him a successful cosmetic surgeon, or, better yet, a singer-songwriter who played sold-out auditorium shows (not greedy, Traynor had stopped wanting to headline arenas at 26) to rapt audiences. But something told him, for once, that it might be a grand idea to keep his mouth shut. It amused him to ask Hove what his many shrinks over the years had asked him so many times. “What would that look like?”

Hove got the joke and smirked appreciatively. “Well, when you go home from school on Monday, you’ll be going to one of the places you lived with Leece, and it will seem perfectly natural. You’ll have no memory of where you live now. I suspect you’ll tell her how much you love her, and how much you admire her to for being kind and generous and tirelessly supportive.”

“I get to go home to Laurel Canyon?” Traynor marveled. “I’m liking the sound of this! But what a long drive that’s going to be. I understand that traffic on the San Rod usually comes to a standstill at around quarter past three.”

Hove got up, grinning indulgently. “I think you’re going to find that you don’t mind the drive at all, Jack.”

He didn’t. Nor, over the course of the drive, did he wonder about where to exit the freeway, or what turns to make. He drove home as absentmindedly as any recent day, though his destination was a house up on Jewett Drive, off Wonderland Avenue, he hadn’t lived in for 28 years.

Much had changed, and everything looked familiar.

Thanks to the antidepressants, he hadn’t had a woman in something like five months, and hadn’t even made use of his own hand in the last three, but he was horny as he turned off Laurel Canyon Blvd. onto Wonderland Avenue, and what a wonderful feeling. He thought of how, on first meeting Lisa, he’d been tongue-tied with lust for a moment. Modest though she was, she’d always loved dressing fashionably, and around the time she and Traynor met, spandex was very much in vogue, and no one in Los Angeles county looked hotter in it than Lisa. What it had amused Traynor to call Little Elvis — “If it’s good enough for The King,” he’d get a laugh from explaining, “it’s good enough for me!” — was stirring in his jeans as he ascended Wonderland. Well, hello there, old buddy!

He got to the house. 1850 Jewett Drive. He chuckled. For what its Musician Union bigwig owner had charged back in the day, the 54-year-old Traynor wouldn’t have been able to rent a garage in the hinterlands. There of course had been no cell phones back in the day, but Traynor was on his third iPhone, and damned if Lisa wasn’t listed among his contacts. He called the number, and she picked up on the third ring, sounding as though she’d last conversed with Traynor 90 minutes before.

“What up, poon?” she said, a little breathlessly. They’d gotten “what up” from either a gritty inner city TV drama, or from a beer commercial. Neither knew for sure where “poon” had come from. It had just come out of one of their mouths one day, and quickly become their go-to term of endearment. The day she’d addressed him as Your Poonificence had been one of the happiest of his life.

“What’s up,” he said trembling with love and relief, and, to be fair, lust, “is that I wanted you to know a thing or two. One is that I love the hell out of you, poon, as I intend to do as long as there’s breath in my lungs. I’m never going to be unfaithful again. Second is that I’m never again going to lose sight of how lucky I am to be loved and encouraged by you, and of what a wonderful sweet person you are, and did I mention that I fucking adore you?”

A thousand times Traynor had seen her let down gently, by pretending that his come-on had been in jest, a guy who didn’t know (or, in some cases, care) that she was his girlfriend and life partner. Modest as she’d always been, she didn’t seem to know how to respond to what he’d said. “I think somebody’s hoping to get laid,” she finally laughed.

“You got that right,” he said in his CB radio voice. “But before that, what I’d really like is to hold you in my arms forever and kiss the top of your sweet, fragrant head.”

She laughed. “It’s the shampoo,” she said. “I’m willing to spend a little extra to have a fragrant head.”

He couldn’t remember ever having felt greater exhilaration than when he entered the house and recognized everything immediately. Lisa’s prized possession, the big Art Deco mirror in which she customarily ensured that she was breathtaking (as Traynor saw it), and presentable (as she did), was there right behind the front door, above the table where they left their keys and sunglasses. The posters (his from the Fillmore Auditorium’s mid-‘60s rock shows, her Maxfield Parrishes) on the walls. Their combined record collection — all vinyl — worrying the shelves to either side of the hilarious old 20-inch-deep TV. His horrid oxblood vinyl recliner and her fuzzy “champagne”-colored loveseat. His ancient upright piano, which, to save a few bucks, he had tuned not quite often enough, with the railroad spike Lisa’s record company sent to reviewers to try to get them interested in a band called The Transcontinental Line displayed phallically atop it. A little house full of old friends, and the woman he adored.

But not everything had remained the same. It was a 58-year-old version of Lisa who came up the stairs. Her loving smile was the same as it ever was, but the 25 extra pounds and sags and wrinkles and reading glasses, suspended from a cord around her neck, were all new to Traynor. This wasn’t a woman fast-talking promotion men in satin warmup jackets would try to hit on. This wasn’t the universal object of desire in spandex he’d treated awfully when they were both young and immortal.

For an awful moment, Traynor’s impulse was to rush back out of the house, and back to the world he’d come to live in. If God had wanted him to find old women desirable, He could have given him the requisite genes, could he not? Was this Hove’s idea of a real knee-slapper?

The moment passed. Lisa embraced Traynor where he stood, her head redolent of coconut. He turned toward the mirror and saw in it that she hadn’t changed after all. Her reflection was radiantly gorgeous, magnificent in her love for him. It was he who was saggy and wrinkled and receding and bellied. And then she was 56 again even in the mirror, and the two were smiling at their own reflections, and then holding onto each other as though nothing could ever part them.

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