The Wishbones. Tom Perrotta
“Yeah.”
“What are you doing out here?”
“You got any better ideas?”
Stan's only response was to trudge over to the curb and sit down. After a couple of seconds he exhaled wearily and stretched his legs out in front of him, revealing a pair of battered work boots protruding like loaves from the cuffs of his black trousers.
“Artie's not going to like that,” Dave pointed out.
“I lost my good shoes,” Stan explained. “I turned the damn house upside down trying to find them. That's why I'm late.”
“Don't sweat it. It's only the showcase.”
“I looked everywhere,” Stan continued, an edge of desperation creeping into his voice. “I mean, what did they do? Get up and take a walk without me?”
Stan had been a wreck for the past couple of months, ever since his wife announced that she was leaving him for her boss, a fifty-five-year-old lawyer with strange puffy hair who appeared in his own TV commercials, encouraging viewers to consider legal remedies for a host of everyday mishaps and conditions. Never the most reliable guy to begin with, Stan had lately been screwing up on a scale that was beginning to jeopardize his situation with Artie, who insisted on running the Wishbones like a business. He'd been late for two gigs in the past month (once because he'd locked his keys in his car, and once because he'd driven all the way to the Royal Oak before remembering that the reception was actually at the Blue Spruce); on a third occasion he'd shown up on time, but without drumsticks.
“I don't try to fuck up,” he explained, as if Dave had inquired about this possibility. “I've just got a lot on my mind right now.”
“No problem.” Dave patted him on the shoulder blade. “It happens to everyone.”
Stan nodded for a long time, as though the secrets of the universe were being revealed to him one by one.
“Do me a favor,” he said. “Tell that to Artie.”
Phil Hart and His Heartstring Orchestra were tuning up on stage #2 when Dave returned to the lounge with Stan's hi-hat in one hand and drum stand in the other. Sparkle was breaking down their equipment on stage #1, and when they were finished, the Wishbones would begin setting up. The two stages—one at either end of the lounge—were the key to the smooth operation of the showcase.
As always, Phil and the boys opened with a surprisingly spunky version of “Celebration,” by Kool and the Gang—surprising, because with the exception of the drummer (Phil's grandson, a pockmarked recovering drug addict named Joey), everyone in the combo had more or less vivid memories of the Hoover administration. Walter, the piano player, whose hands shook terribly when he was doing anything but tickling the ivories, was rumored to be eighty-two years old.
Despite their age, powder blue uniforms, and schizoid repertoire, the Heartstring Orchestra was made up of real musicians, old pros from the Big Band era (the reed player's twin brother had apparently toured for a couple of years with Tommy Dorsey). When they shifted away from disco standards to songs that were better suited to their talents—“Chattanooga Choo-Choo,” “Paper Doll,” “Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy”— you couldn't help but notice a change of weather inside the Sundown Lounge. Fingers started snapping; heads began to bob. It wasn't unusual to see a natty-looking older couple—the Orchestra specialized in second and third marriages—put down their drinks and take a graceful turn around the dance floor.
Phil Hart himself wasn't the greatest singer in the world, but he was a true showman. The man had style. Dave always took a moment to admire his distinctive way of moving onstage, a high-elbowed liquidy sway that was the essence of geriatric cool. If you asked, Phil would happily reveal the secret of his remarkable vitality.
“Artificial hips!” he'd exclaim, shaking his head at the marvels of modern technology. “I can wiggle again!”
One of the things Dave liked best about the wedding band was its efficiency. They could set up in twenty minutes and break down even faster than that. Some of the rock bands he'd played in had been weighed down by so much equipment that he'd felt more like a roadie than a musician. Lockjaw was the worst offender. He remembered an outdoor Battle of the Bands where they'd taken four hours to set up for a forty-five-minute performance marred by such earsplitting shrieks of feedback that even the die-hard headbangers in the audience were squeezing their ears, begging for mercy. (Lockjaw came in fifth out of five bands and dissolved a few months later.)
The Wishbones made music on a more human scale. Dave had joined the band with a number of reservations—the uniforms, the cheesy tunes, Artie's reputation as a ballbuster—but he quickly came to realize that the rewards went far beyond the two hundred dollars he got for playing a four-hour gig.
It turned out, amazingly enough, to be a blast. People drank at weddings. They danced like maniacs. They clapped and hooted and made requests. Every now and then, when the chemistry was right, things got raucous. And when that happened, the Wishbones knew how to crank up the volume and rock, with no apologies to anyone.
Dave had friends who were still chasing their dreams, playing in dingy clubs to audiences of twelve bored drunks, splitting thirty-nine dollars among four guys at the end of the night, then dragging themselves home at three o'clock in the morning. He saw the best of them growing exhausted and bitter, endlessly chewing over the thankless question of why the world still didn't give a shit.
Dave himself still hadn't completely surrendered his dream of the Big Time, but he had moved it to the back burner. Someday, maybe, the perfect band would come along, a band so good that no one would be able to say no to them. Until then, though, Dave was a Wishbone, and it was a helluva lot better than nothing.
Afterwards, because the event came to seem so significant in retrospect, he sometimes found himself trying to reconstruct it in his memory, as though the smallest detail might hold the key to some larger mystery.
The Wishbones had just finished setting up when the Heart-string Orchestra broke into “Like a Virgin,” their next-to-last tune of the night. If Madonna had happened to wander into the Sundown to check out the showcase, Dave thought she would have approved. Phil Hart gave the song a hilarious deadpan interpretation, as though it had never entered his mind that some people might find it amusing to see a seventy-three-year-old man with artificial hips doing a dignified shimmy at the mike stand as he sang about being touched for the very first time.
Dave leaned his guitar against his amp and stepped down from the rickety wooden platform that served as stage #1. He waved to the waitress, a brassy-haired woman of indeterminate age named Hilda, and mimed the act of bringing a glass to his mouth. Hilda nodded, but moved across the lounge in the opposite direction to wait on some paying customers, a young couple holding hands across the table and gazing at each other with that blissful prenewlywed intensity that would somehow evolve over the next two decades into the vacant stares of the long-married. It wasn't until Ian sidled up to him a few seconds later that Dave realized he'd been frozen in place, the invisible empty glass still tilted to his lips.
“Mick Box,” said Ian.
“Shit,” said Dave.
At every Wishbone function, Ian tried to stump Dave with a piece of rock trivia. He specialized in obscure British musicians from second-rate bands of the early seventies.
“Take your time,” Ian taunted. “It'll come to you.”
“Mick Box,” Dave chanted. “Mick Box … Mick Box … Mick Box …”
“You probably haven't thought about this band for fifteen years.”
A face began to take shape in Dave's mind. Narrow, ferrety features. The obligatory hair.
“I'm seeing a mustache,” he said.
“If it's a Fu Manchu, you're definitely getting warmer.”
“I want to say Mott the Hoople, but that's Mick Ronson.”
Dave's