The Word 3/The Word 3.adf/Words/SNEAKERS2.TXT/SNEAKERS2.TXT

Text File | 1992-09-02 | 15.6 KB | 305 lines

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                  Continued from "The Word" issue 2...
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He  thought  about  them  again  the following evening.  He was at home,
sitting  on  the  toilet  in  his own bathroom, reading "Everything That
Rises  Must  Converge"  while  Vivaldi  played  mildly  from the bedroom
speakers  (although  Tell  now mixed rock and roll for a living, he only
owned  four  or  five rock records, most of them by Creedence Clearwater
Revival).

He  looked  up  from  his book, somewhat startled.  A question of cosmic
ludicrousness  had  suddenly  occurred to him:  How long is it since you
took a crap in the evening, John?

He  didn't know, but he thought he might be taking them then quite a bit
more  frequently in the future.  At least one of his habits had changed,
it seemed.

Sitting  in the living room fifteen minutes later, his book forgotten in
his lap, something else occurred to him:  he hadn't used the third floor
rest  room once that day.  They had gone across the street for coffee at
ten,  and he had taken a whizz in the men's room of The Donut Shop while
Paul  and  Georgie sat at the counter, drinking coffee and talking about
overdubs.   Then,  on his lunch hour, he had made a pit-stop at the Brew
'n Burger...  and another on the first floor late that afternoon when he
had  gone  down to drop off a bunch of mail that he could just as easily
stuffed into the mailslot by the elevators.

Avoiding  the  third-floor  men's?  Was that what he'd been doing today,
without even realising it?  You bet your sweatsocks.  Avoiding it like a
scared kid who goes a block out of his way coming home from school so he
won't have to go past the local haunted house.  He had been spooked by a
pair of dirty sneakers.

Aloud, very clearly, Tell said:  "This has got to stop."

                            ---------------

But  that  was  Thursday  night  and  something  happened on Friday that
changed  everything.  That was when the door closed between him and Paul
Janning.

Tell  was  a  shy  man and didn't make friends easily.  In high school a
quirk of fate had put him 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
instrument and having it rammed up his ass to the fifth fret went a long
way toward breaking 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 Wyman, 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 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 glamour, 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 a fist fight), Tell
joined  a  band  formed  by  the  Saturn's  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, part-
time  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 realised 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, 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 cradle 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 unpertubed.
  "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 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 mind
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 good job, you need that Daltrey tape in
your  portfolio  even  more  than  you  need  the two weeks' salary.  Be
careful, John.

But  that wasn't all of it.  That was the small of it.  The fact was 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
interlocking 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 green 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 cigarrette 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  to 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 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.

When  I  get  back I'll tell Paul I don't feel well and take the rest of
the  day off, he thought, but he wouldn't.  Paul had been in an erratic,
unpleasant mood all morning, and Tell knew he was part (or maybe all) of
the  reason why.  Might Paul fire him out of spite?  A week ago he would
have laughed at such an idea.  But a week ago he had still believed what
he  had come to believe in his growing-up:  friends were real and ghosts
were make-believe.  Did he think the sneakers in the men's room belonged
to  a ghost?  Well, as a matter of fact he did.  Which, when taken along
with  the events of the night before, meant he had everything backwards:
friends were make-believe and ghosts were real.

  "The  prodigal  returns," Janning said without looking araound as Tell
opened  the  second  of the studio's two doors - the one that was called
the "dead air" door.  "I thought you died in there, Johnny."

  "No," Tell said, "Not me."

                            ---------------

It  was a ghost; Tell found out whose a day before the Daltrey mix - and
his  association  with  Paul  Janning - ended, but before that hapened a
great  many other things did.  Except they were all the same thing, just
little  mile-markers,  like  the  one  on  the  Pennysylvania  Turnpike,
announcing  John  Tell's steady progress toward a nervous breakdown.  He
knew  this  was  happening,  understood  why it was happening, and still
could  not  help  it  from happening.  It seemed he was not driving this
particular road but being chaufeured.

At  first  his course of action seemed clear-cut and simple:  avoid that
men's  room,  and  avoid all questions about the sneakers, stop thinking
about it.

But  he  couldn't  stop  thinking  about  it.  It crept up on him at odd
moments  and  pounced  like  an old grief.  He would be sitting at home,
some  stupid  game-show on the tube, and think about the flies, or about
janitors replacing the toilet paper, and then he would look at the clock
and  see  an hour had passed.  Or he would think it was all a malevolent
practical joke.

Paul's  in  on it, and probably that thin guy from Janus Music I see him
talking  to  every now and again, and probablythe receptionist, him with
his Camels and his dead sceptical eyes.  Not George, he couldn't keep it
from  me  if  Paul  shouted  him  into  going  along, but anyone else is
possible.   Shit,  maybe  even Riger Daltrey himself took a turn wearing
those sneakers!

He  recognised  these thoughts as paranoid fantasies but the worst thing
was  that  recognition  did  not  lead todispersion.  The thoughts lived
their  own  lives inside his brain.  He would tll them to go away, there
was  no cabal led by Paul Janning out to get him, and his mind would say
Yeah,  okay,  makes  sense  to  me, and five hours later - or maybe only
twenty  minutes  - he would see a bunch of them sitting around Desmond's
Steak  House two blocks downtown:  Paul, the receptionist who smoked the
Camels,  maybe  even  the  fat guy from Snappy Kards, all of them eating
shrimp  cocktails  and  drinking.  And laughing, of course.  Laughing at
him,  while  the  dirty white sneakers they took turns wearing sat under
the table in a crumpled brown bag.

Tell could see that brown bag.  That was how bad it had gotten.

But  the  worst  thing  was  just  this:  the third-floor men's room has
aqcuired a pull.  It was if there was a powerful magnet in there and his
pockets  were  full  of iron filings.  If someone had told him something
like that he would have laughed (maybe just inside, if the person making
the  metaphor  seemed  very much in earnest), but it was really there, a
feeling  like  a swerve every time he passed the men's on his way to the
studios or back to the elevators.  It was a terrible feeling, like being
pulled toward an open window sixty stories up or watching helplessly, as
if from outside yourself, as you raised a pistol to your lips and sucked
the barrel.

He  wanted  to  look  again.  He realized one more look was about all it
would  take  to finish him off, but it made no difference.  He wanted to
look again.

Each time he passed, that mental swerve.
In his dreams he opened that door again and again.  Just to get a look.
To get a really good look.

He  couldn't  get it out.  That was the worst of it.  He understood that
if he could get it out, pour it into someone else's ear, it would change
its  shape,  perhaps  even  grow  a  handle with which he could hold it.
Twice he went into bars and managed to strike up a conversation with the
man  next  to him.  Because bars, he thought, were the places where talk
was at its absolute cheapest.  Bargain basement rates.

He  had no more than opened his mouth on the first occasion when the man
he  had  picked  began to sermonize on the subject of the Yankees, Billy
Martin,   and   that   asshols  George  Steinbrunner.   Steinbrunner  in
particular  seemed  to  get under this man's skin.  It was impossible to
get a word in edgeways and Tell soon gave up trying.

The second time, he managed to work up a fairly casual conversation with
a  man  who  looked  like  a construction worker.  They talked about the
weather  and  baseball  (but this man, like Janning, was a Mets fan, and
not  at  all nutty on the subject), progressed to jobs, and so on.  Tell
was  sweating.   He  felt  as if he was doing some heavy piece of manual
labour  -  pushing  a  wheelbarrow filled with cement up a slight grade,
maybe - but he also felt as if he wasn't doing too badly.

The  guy  who  looked  like  a  construction  worker  was drinking Black
Russians.   Tell stuck to beer.  It felt as if he was sweating it out as
fast  as  he was putting it in, but after he had bought the guy a couple
of  drinks  and the guy had bought Tell a couple of schooners, he nerved
himself to begin.

  "You want to hear something really strange?"  He said.
  "You queer?" the guy who looked like a construction worker asked him
before Tell could get any further.  He turned on his stool and looked at
Tell with amiable curiosity.  "I mean, it's nothn' to me wether y'are or
not, but I just thought I'd tell you I don't go for that stuff.  Have it
up front, you know?"
  "I'm not queer," Tell said.
  "Oh.  What's really strange?"
  "Huh?"
  "You said something really strange."
  "Oh,  it  really  wasn't that strange," Tell said, then glanced at his
watch and said it was getting late.

                            ---------------

        This  was the second part of three of a serialisation of
        Stephen King's "Sneakers" Short story (disk-mags are the
        only  places where you can do that :), part one appeared
        in  issue 2, and part three appears in The Word 4, along
        with a brief comment from yours truly.  If you'd like to
        comment  on  the story either way (good or bad) then get
        your articles ready for issue 5.
                                                    Freak of NFA
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