John Tell had been working at Tabori Studios just over a month when he first noticed the sneakers. Tabori was in a building which had once been called Music City and had been, in the early days of rock and roll and top-forty rhythm and blues, a very big deal. Back then you never would have seen a pair of sneakers (unless they were on the feet of a delivery boy) above lobby-level. Those days were gone, though, and so were the big-money producers with their reet pleats and pointy-toed snakeskin shoes. Sneakers were now just another part of the Music City uniform, and when Tell first glimpsed these, he made no negative assumptions about their owner. Well, maybe one: the guy really could have used a new pair. These had been white when they were new, but from the look of them new had been a long time ago.
That was all he noticed when he first saw the sneakers in the little room where you so often ended up judging your neighbor by his footwear because that was all you ever saw of him. Tell spied this pair under the door of the first toilet-stall in the third-floor men's room. He passed them on his way to the third and last stall. He came out a few minutes later, washed and dried his hands, combed his hair, and then went back to Studio F, where he was helping to mix an album by a heavy-metal group called The Dead Beats. To say Tell had already forgotten the sneakers would be an overstatement, because they had hardly registered on his mental radar screen to begin with.
Paul Jannings was producing The Dead Beats' sessions. He wasn't famous in the way the old be-bop kings of Music City had been famous — Tell thought rock-and-roll music was no longer strong enough to breed such mythic royalty — but he was fairly well-known, and Tell himself thought he was the best producer of rock-and-roll records currently active in the field; only Jimmy Iovine could come close.
Tell had first seen him at a party following the premiere of a concert film; had, in fact, recognized him from across the room. The hair was graying now, and the sharp features of Jannings's handsome face had become almost gaunt, but there was no mistaking the man who had recorded the legendary Tokyo Sessions with Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, John Lennon, and Al Kooper some fifteen years earlier. Other than Phil Spector, Jannings was the only record producer Tell could have recognized by sight as well as by the distinctive sound of his recordings — crystal-clear top ends underscored by percussion so heavy it shook your clavicle. It was that Don McLean clarity you heard first on the Tokyo Sessions recordings, but if you wiped the treble, what you heard pulsing along through the underbrush was pure Sandy Nelson.
Tell's natural reticence was overcome by admiration and he had crossed the room to where Jannings was standing, temporarily unengaged. He introduced himself, expecting a quick handshake and a few perfunctory words at most. Instead, the two of them had fallen into a long and interesting conversation. They worked in the same field and knew some of the same people, but even then Tell had known there was more to the magic of that initial meeting than those things; Paul Jannings was just one of those rare men to whom he found he could talk, and for John Tell, talking really was akin to magic.
Toward the end of the conversation, Jannings had asked him if he was looking for work.
'Did you ever know anyone in this business who wasn't?' Tell asked.
Jannings laughed and asked for his phone number. Tell had given it to him, not attaching much importance to the request — it was most likely a gesture of politeness on the other man's part, he'd thought. But Jannings had called him three days later to ask if Tell would like to be part of the three-man team mixing The Dead Beats' first album. 'I don't know if it's really possible to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear,' Jannings had said, 'but since Atlantic Records is footing the bills, why not have a good time trying?' John Tell saw no reason at all why not, and signed on for the cruise immediately.
A week or so after he first saw the sneakers, Tell saw them again. He only registered the fact that it was the same guy because the sneakers were in the same place — under the door of stall number one in the third-floor men's. There was no question that they were the same ones; white (once, anyway) high tops with dirt in the deep creases. He noticed an empty eyelet and thought, Must not have had your own eyes all the way open when you laced that one up, friend. Then he went on down to the third stall (which he thought of, in some vague way, as 'his'). This time he glanced at the sneakers on his way out, as well, and saw something odd when he did: there was a dead fly on one of them. It lay on the rounded toe of the left sneaker, the one with the empty eyelet, with its little legs sticking up.
When he got back to Studio F, Jannings was sitting at the board with his head clutched in his hands.
'You okay, Paul?'
'What's wrong?'
'Me. I was wrong. I am wrong. My career is finished. I'm washed up. Eighty-sixed. Over-done-with-gone.'
'What are you talking about?' Tell looked around for Georgie Ronkler and didn't see him anywhere. It didn't surprise him. Jannings had periodic fugues and Georgie always left when he saw one coming on. He claimed his karma didn't allow him to deal with strong emotion. 'I cry at supermarket openings,' Georgie said.
'You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear,' Jannings said. He pointed with his fist at the glass between the mixing room and the performance studio. He looked like a man giving the old Nazi Heil Hitler salute. 'At least not out of pigs like those.'
'Lighten up,' Tell said, although he knew Jannings was perfectly right. The Dead Beats, composed of four dull bastards and one dull bitch, were personally repulsive and professionally incompetent.
'Lighten this up,' Jannings said, and flipped him the bird.
'God, I hate temperament,' Tell said.
Jannings looked up at him and giggled. A second later they were both laughing. Five minutes after that they were back to work.
The mix — such as it was — ended a week later. Tell asked Jannings for a recommendation and a tape.
'Okay, but you know you're not supposed to play the tape for anyone until the album comes out,' Jannings said.
'I know.'
'And why you'd ever want to, for anyone, is beyond me. These guys make The Butthole Surfers sound like The Beatles.'
'Come on, Paul, it wasn't that bad. And even if it was, it's over.'
He smiled. 'Yeah. There's that. And if I ever work in this business again, I'll give you a call.'
'That would be great.'
They shook hands. Tell left the building which had once been known as Music City, and the thought of the sneakers under the door of stall number one in the third-floor men's John never crossed his mind.
Jannings, who had been in the business twenty-five years, had once told him that when it came to mixing bop (he never called it rock and roll, only bop), you were either shit or Superman. For the two months following the Beats' mixing session, John Tell was shit. He didn't work. He began to get nervous about the rent. Twice he almost called Jannings, but something in him thought that would be a mistake.
Then the music mixer on a film called Karate Masters of Massacre died of a massive coronary and Tell got six weeks' work at the Brill Building (which had been known as Tin Pan Alley back in the heyday of Broadway and the Big Band sound), finishing the mix. It was library stuff in the public domain — and a few plinking sitars — for the most part, but it paid the rent. And following his last day on the show, Tell had no more than walked into his apartment before the phone rang. It was Paul Jannings, asking him if he had checked the Billboard pop chart lately. Tell said he hadn't.
'It came on at number seventy-nine.' Jannings managed to sound simultaneously disgusted, amused, and amazed. 'With a bullet.'
'What did?' But he knew as soon as the question was out of his mouth.
' ''Diving in the Dirt.'' '
It was the name of a cut on The Dead Beats' forthcoming Beat It 'Til It's Dead album, the only cut which had seemed to Tell and Jannings remotely like single material.
'Shit!'
'Indeed it is, but I have a crazy idea it's gonna go top ten. Have you seen the video?'
'No.'
'What a scream. It's mostly Ginger, the chick in the group, playing mud-honey in some generic bayou with a guy who looks like Donald Trump in overalls. It sends what my intellectual friends like to call 'mixed cultural messages'.' And Jannings laughed so hard Tell had to hold the phone away from his ear.
When Jannings had himself under control again, he said, 'Anyway, it probably means the album'll go top ten, too. A platinum-plated dog-turd is still a dog-turd, but a platinum reference is platinum all the way through — you understand dis t'ing, Bwana?'
'Indeed I do,' Tell said, pulling open his desk drawer to make sure his Dead Beats cassette, unplayed since Jannings had given it to him on the last day of the mix, was still there.
'So what are you doing?' Jannings asked him.
'Looking for a job.'
'You want to work with me again? I'm doing Roger Daltrey's new album. Starts in two weeks.'
'Christ, yes!'
The money would be good, but it was more than that; following The Dead Beats and six weeks of Karate Masters of Massacre, working with the ex-lead singer of The Who would be like coming into a warm place on a cold night. Whatever he might turn out to be like personally, the man could sing. And working with Jannings again would be good, too. 'Where?'
'Same old stand. Tabori at Music City.'
'I'm there.'
Roger Daltrey not only could sing, he turned out to be a tolerably nice guy in the bargain. Tell thought the next three or four weeks would be good ones. He had a job, he had a production credit on an album that had popped onto the Billboard charts at number forty-one (and the single was up to number seventeen and still climbing), and he felt safe about the rent for the first time since he had come to New York from Pennsylvania four years ago.
It was June, trees were in full leaf, girls were wearing short skirts again, and the world seemed a fine place to be. Tell felt this way on his first day back at work for Paul Jannings until approximately 11.45 p.m. Then he walked into the third-floor bathroom, saw the same once-white sneakers under the door of stall one, and all his good feelings suddenly collapsed.
They are not the same. Can't be the same.
They were, though. That single empty eyelet was the clearest point of identification, but everything else about them was also the same. Exactly the same, and that included their positions. There was only one real difference that Tell could see: there were more dead flies around them now.
He went slowly into the third stall, 'his' stall, lowered his pants, and sat down. He wasn't surprised to find that the urge which had brought him here had entirely departed. He sat still for a little while just the same, however, listening for sounds. The rattle of a newspaper. The clearing of a throat. Hell, even a fart.
No sounds came.
That's because I'm in here alone, Tell thought. Except, that is, for the dead guy in the first stall.
The bathroom's outer door banged briskly open. Tell almost screamed. Someone hummed his way over to the urinals, and as water began to splash out there, an explanation occurred to Tell and he relaxed. It was so simple it was absurd . . . and undoubtedly correct. He glanced at his watch and saw it was 1:47.
A regular man is a happy man, his father used to say. Tell's dad had been a taciturn fellow, and that saying (along with Clean your hands before you clean your plate} had been one of his few aphorisms. If regularity really did mean happiness, then Tell supposed he was a happy man. His need to visit the bathroom came on at about the same time every day, and he supposed the same must be true of his pal Sneakers, who favored Stall #i just as Tell himself favored Stall #3.
If you needed to pass the stalls to get to the urinals, you would have seen that stall empty lots of times, or with different shoes under it. After all, what are the chances a body could stay undiscovered in a men's-room toilet-stall for . . .
He worked out in his mind the time he'd last been there.
. . . four months, give or take?
No chance at all was the answer to that one. He could believe the janitors weren't too fussy about cleaning the stalls — all those dead flies — but they would have to check on the toilet-paper supply every day or two, right? And even if you left those things out, dead people started to smell after awhile, right? God knew this wasn't the sweetest-smelling place on earth — and following a visit from the fat guy who worked down the hall at Janus Music it was almost uninhabitable — but surely the stink of a dead body would be a lot louder. A lot gaudier.
Gaudy? Gaudy? Jesus, what a word. And how would you know? You never smelted a decomposing body in your life.
True, but he was pretty sure he'd know what he was smelling if he did. Logic was logic and regularity was regularity and that was the end of it. The guy was probably a pencil-pusher from Janus or a writer for Snappy Kards, on the other side of the floor. For all John Tell knew, the guy was in there composing greeting-card verse right now:
Roses are red and violets are blue,
You thought I was dead but that wasn't true;
I just deliver my mail at the same time as you!
That sucks, Tell thought, and uttered a wild little laugh. The fellow who had banged the door open, almost startling him into a scream, had progressed to the wash-basins. Now the splashing-lathering sound of him washing his hands stopped briefly. Tell could imagine the newcomer listening, wondering who was laughing behind one of the closed stall doors, wondering if it was a joke, a dirty picture, or if the man was just crazy. There were, after all, lots of crazy people in New York. You saw them all the time, talking to themselves and laughing for no appreciable reason . . . the way Tell had just now.
Tell tried to imagine Sneakers also listening and couldn't.
Suddenly he didn't feel like laughing any more.
Suddenly he just felt like getting out of there.
He didn't want the man at the basin to see him, though. The man would look at him. Just for a moment, but that would be enough to know what he was thinking. People who laughed behind closed toilet-stall doors were not to be trusted.
Click-clack of shoes on the old white hexagonal bathroom tiles, whooze of the door being opened, hisshh of it settling slowly back into place. You could bang it open but the pneumatic elbow-joint kept it from banging shut. That might upset the third-floor receptionist as he sat smoking Camels and reading the latest issue of Krrang!
God, it's so silent in here! Why doesn't the guy move? At least a little?
But there was just the silence, thick and smooth and total, the sort of silence the dead would hear in their coffins if they could still hear, and Tell again became convinced that Sneakers was dead, fuck logic, he was dead and had been dead for who knew how long, he was sitting in there and if you opened the door you would see some slumped mossy thing with its hands dangling between its thighs, you would see —
For a moment he was on the verge of calling, Hey, Sneaks! You all right?
But what if Sneakers answered, not in a questioning or irritated voice but in a froggy grinding croak? Wasn't there something about waking the dead? About —
Suddenly Tell was up, up fast, flushing the toilet and buttoning his pants, out of the stall, zipping his fly as he headed for the door, aware that in a few seconds he was going to feel silly but not caring. Yet he could not forbear one glance under the first stall as he passed. Dirty white mislaced sneakers. And dead flies. Quite a few of them.
Weren't any dead flies in my stall. And just how is it that all this time has gone by and he still hasn't noticed that he missed one of the eyelets? Or does he wear em that way all the time, as some kind of artistic statement?
Tell hit the door pretty hard coming out. The receptionist just up the hall glanced at him with the cool curiosity he saved for beings merely mortal (as opposed to such deities in human form as Roger Daltrey).
Tell hurried down the hall to Tabori Studios.
'Paul?'
'What?' Jannings answered without looking up from the board. Georgie Ronkler was standing off to one side, watching Jannings closely and nibbling a cuticle — cuticles were all he had left to nibble; his fingernails simply did not exist above the point where they parted company with live flesh and hot nerve-endings. He was close to the door. If Jannings began to rant, Georgie
would slip through it.
'I think there might be something wrong in — '
Jannings groaned. 'Something else?'
'What do you mean?'
'This drum track is what I mean. It's badly botched, and I don't know what we can do about it.' He flicked a toggle, and drums crashed into the studio. 'You hear it?'
The snare, you mean?'
'Of course I mean the snare! It stands out a mile from the rest of the percussion, but it's married to it!'
'Yes, but — '
'Yes but Jesus bloody fuck. I hate shit like this! Forty tracks I got here, forty goddam tracks to record a simple bop tune and some idiot technician — '
From the tail of his eye Tell saw Georgie disappear like a cool breeze.
'But look, Paul, if you lower the equalization — '
'The eq's got nothing to do with — '
'Shut up and listen a minute,' Tell said soothingly — something he could have said to no one else on the face of the earth — and slid a switch. Jannings stopped ranting and started listening. He asked a question. Tell answered it. Then he asked one Tell couldn't answer, but Jannings was able to answer it himself, and all of a sudden they were looking at a whole new spectrum of possibilities for a song called 'Answer to You, Answer to Me'.
After awhile, sensing that the storm had passed, Georgie Ronkler crept back in.
And Tell forgot all about the sneakers.
HTML layout and style by Stephen Thomas, University of Adelaide.
Modified by Skip for ESL Bits English Language Learning.