Clear Wet Veil
by Jon Vreeland

I set my phone on the ground next to the locked door after hanging up with Pops. Ivory and her eighty-eight black and white bloodstained keys rested on the other side, waiting to be rescued and taken out to sea. Twenty-six miles across the channel for a gig with The Blues Merchants on Catalina Island; a gig Pops was adamant about me attending, but I couldn’t figure out why...

“I don’t care what you gotta do; just kick the door in and get it out.”

“Like break it? Come on dad you know Ron will kill me.”

“I’ll help you fix it just get your keyboard out of there and come over here.”

“Okay but I don’t feel so good; I think I’m gonna puke for sure.”

“Just get it son. Hurry up.” And I did.

After a few kicks to the hollow closet door, I backed up as far as I could go, past the drums, around the Marshall half-stacks and empty boxes of beer. Against the purple wall of our lockout studio we built ourselves, smelling the day old tequila slithering off my tongue and out my pores, contaminating the air and making it harder for me to breathe. I counted to three, then ran full speed at the door, lowering and driving my left shoulder with full vehemence, crashing through the already injured door, landing on a plethora of guitars, amps, microphone stands; a bunch of neglected and broken instruments hiding sadly in the darkness of the studio’s closet. Ivory leaned graciously in the corner against the unpainted wall, smiling down at her Master as I lied on my back, with a microphone stand inadvertently being shoved up my virgin ass. I picked her up, gently, carried her to my car and drove to my parents. It was a quarter past ten in the morning.
...

I was holding the vomit down as Momma, Pops, and I drove up Pacific Coast Highway. Pops doing anything he could to make sure we made it to the boat in time for its departure, meandering in and out of traffic in his red pickup truck like Mario Andretti did on those very streets in the Long Beach Grand Prix. Ivory was wrapped in an old comforter with a thousand cigarette burns. She was sliding around in the bed of the truck as we tried catching the Catalina Express which was set to leave at 11am sharp, with or without us.

We parked the car and ran as fast as we could, towing Ivory on a big awkward noisy cart that sounded like a dump truck driving through an underground dungeon. He yelled for the employees, probably scaring them a little at first, to sojourn the boat. As soon as they saw Pops trudging as fast as his bad knees would allow him, and calling out to “Hold the boat,” the deckhand tied the boat back up and practically rolled out the red carpet for us. (Pops rides the boat all the time. The deckhands call him The Dude. Yes, The Big Lebowski, Jeff Bridges...The Dude. His long dark hair and Hawaiian shirt, illuminating his size and tortoise shell Ray-Bans, the gas station version of course, makes him the spitting image.)

We boarded the Catalina Express at 10:59 a.m., huffing and puffing, drawing a lot of attention to ourselves. We sat in a booth. I immediately ordered a water and a Bud bottle. I rested my forehead on the dirty table. After giving Ivory a proper scrutiny, they took her underneath the deck with the passenger’s luggage. I was still going to puke. I still couldn’t understand the importance of a show on a Sunday afternoon, and why we practically died trying to make it to the boat to get to an island I practically lived at recently, in an old hotel, where the spitting sinks have minds of their own.

The beer and tequila were working their way up my burning throat and neck. I was not happy. I was about to cry. I wanted to get off the boat but the Express left the dock the minute we sat down. Face down. Eyes closed. My body asleep, like a fixed junky at 9pm, but my head wide awake, writhing in a restive vexation. The passengers talked about their sister’s cancer, their husband’s prescription pill addiction, how dad used to rough him up and push him around, claiming he was teaching him how to be a man; he was fifteen at the time. Who cares? The strangers’ monotonous lives spun in my head, and their upcoming weekend and all of its bore. I rested my head on Momma’s shoulder as the boat waltzed up and down like lovers at sea, while the generators hummed an ugly tone, and water splashed the plastic windows—a veil made from Plexiglas—the swell evolving into something colossal and nauseating.

And the beer swooshed violently in my stomach.

“You okay son?” Pops kindly asked, looking genuinely concerned.

“Not really Pops I think I’m gonna yak.”

“Do you want me to get you a bag or something?” Momma asked just as concerned.

“Sure I’ll probably need it.”

I saw my verdant reflection in the clear wet veil. Momma got up and came back holding a bag with a picture of the Catalina Express on both sides. It was white with blue handles. It was made from recycled water bottles and hemp, the kind that people, including myself, a lover of our Mother, carry in the grocery store. And I was sure I could fill it with everything dead, dying, and rotting in my stomach.

The boat pulled into Avalon at just about noon. My head still buried in the bag. Nothing came up. Just hot dry breath from the driest heaves I ever tasted.
…

Roger was the lead singer and guitarist of the Blues Merchants and was waiting for us in his green golf cart. We exited the boat, walked to the luggage line, and waited. I grabbed Ivory and carried her to the golf cart like how a bride is carried by her groom on their wedding night. I stood her up in the very back, sat next to her, and held her like a predator holds his prey. I detained my muse so she wouldn’t fall to her death, leaving me with half a soul, the shitty half, the deaf tone half that is rarely invited to Thanksgiving, Christmas, and most holidays involving dead birds and dead trees and drained bank accounts and unwanted pounds and alcoholic tragedy’s and long meandering lines and exhaustion with a side of glamour and a very small splash of serenity and a shred of suicidal thinking. I just can’t bare to think about but I do anyways when I sit alone starving, lonely, disconsolate, muddled, wondering what I did to deserve this horrible isolation. I can taste this poisoned reverie that reoccurs night after night.

And then the morning turns purple.

And the grinning moon shines a clear pearl white. Then it happens again. This time illuminated by the fiery sun and its power to adorn, before shriveling up to a deep scarlet burn. Juxtaposed with the ultimate demise, lurking the realms of my dimmest shadows, searching for anything to mend my shattered soul, and sometimes my perishable thin shelled head, that, on occasion, walks as far as it wants to walk.

No matter what the circumstances.

No matter what kind of rules.

But always returns to its Riveting Master.

Momma, Pops, and me piled in the golf cart. We were chauffeured to the Casino on the west end of Avalon Bay. The gig was set up for 2p.m, under a Catalina sun. We pulled up to the casino and parked. I headed straight for the bar.

“A beer and a shot of your best tequila por favor,” I said, my arm around Ivory.

“And her?” He asked with a scathing grin.

“She’s good.”

“She is so quiet.”

“She only speaks when I tell her too,” I said shooting the shot and chasing it with a beer. By the time our first set started I was no longer sick. I was nice and drunk again. Someone kept setting beers on the stage during our first set, right under Ivory as I fondled and caressed her accordingly. She yelped and crooned like Chelsea Girl and Chief Mojo Risen, fucking on stage in front of hundreds of people while the booze soddened everyone’s brain.

And brought the best out of the worst.

And the worst out of the best.

Each bottle was emptied quite hastily. I lost count after six beers and three shots. In the interim, Momma cleaned the bar out of all its wine. Pink wine, her favorite, with ice. During the first set I watched her from the right side of the stage, if you’re facing the crowd, dancing like a teenager, having the time of her life.

Pops sat with his arms crossed.

Not saying a single word.

During intermission I drank two beers and a shot of Patron. Ivory waited patiently. Imposingly, on the right side of her stage. She was by far the star of the afternoon. When it was time to go back on stage I brought two beers with me and set them underneath Ivory, away from my Chucks and safe from disaster. I flipped the switch and watched Ivory’s eyes light up like a pinball machine. I touched her softly, as the others crept back onstage to start our second set. But something was different. There was a stranger on stage with us, at least to me there was, tiptoeing around Ivory, giving her the respect she deserves. An older man holding a vintage Fender Stratocaster, white, plugging into a vintage Orange amp sitting on the floor next to Ivory. And this guy was by far the oldest on stage. At least sixty years old.

I shook his hand...

“Hey I’m Jon.”

“Nice to meet you Jon my name is Spencer,” he replied, and just as I suspected, he did it in an English accent.

Pops was down in front, about ten feet from the stage, his arms uncrossed, grinning a mighty grin of the proudest father I had ever seen. The old man on stage appearing for the second set was Spencer Davis of the Spencer Davis Group—a huge band amid the British Invasion—and he was the surprise guest for the day. Pops was right. He had told me I will regret it if I don’t go, “NO hangover is worth missing this,” he had told me on the Express. And just like most of the time, Pops was right. We played for over an hour. We played three of Spencer’s classics and about seven other classic blues songs—Robert Johnson, Elmore James, Muddy Waters, Eric Clapton—granting me a solo on each song, letting me outshine everyone in the band, even in my bright purple hair, and Crimson Skull smiling on my faded black Misfits t-shirt.

Towards the end of our brilliant set, the music decelerated, and Roger introduced everyone in the band, amid the thundering bass and drums, a tribal beat that pulled my gaze towards the hills of Catalina where the Buffalo roam like the stars of a Hollywood movie. Roger guided the audience’s attention to each member, one at a time, hearing the crowd’s approval for each man holding his shiny or bloody ax. And when Roger pointed to me and told the crowd this youngster’s name, they erupted with the biggest and most obvious approval of the afternoon, applauding my vibrant youth and how I handled Ivory like a beautiful witch, leaving a trail of red on her black and white dress, letting her drink the blood straight from my hands.

We were all loaded up in the golf cart when I remembered that I hadn’t yet got paid. Roger told me to talk to the bartender or the owner. I walked inside and the owner was sitting in the nearest booth, counting a pile of money.

“Hey how’s it going?” I said with a heavy slur, “We were just leaving and I almost forgot to get paid,” I told him. I was fucked up. “Roger said to come in and get paid.”

“Oh really?” he said sarcastically, a big smile crawling along his wrinkled face. “You’re the piano player right? Your pay was $100 for the day minus 11 beers and six shots of tequila; you drank $108 worth of booze so you owe me $8. “How do you want to pay?”

Mother Fucker!

“Be right back,” I told him with a grimace I was sure he would notice, “I gotta go get the money from Pops, and he’s just outside.”

I walked outside and lit up a cigarette. The cart now surrounded by a cloud of delicious smoke. I sat on the back and gave Ivory another bear hug, then my Pops asked me as he tousled my purple hair like a proud father should. “Everything good son? All ready to go?” He asked.

“All ready Pops, let’s hit it. Ready Momma?” I said rubbing shoulders with my smiling mother, a grin that never gets old.

As the golf cart rolled away to the other side of the island I could see the owner of the place walk out, veiling his eyes from the sun with a paper in his hand. Once he spotted us he lowered his hand and kept staring as we and my middle finger shrank into the distance, to the other end of Catalina where the boats come and go every hour, keeping the Island alive and breathing. We boarded the boat, strangely, finding the same seats we sat in on the way up. Pops got up to go to the bathroom and came back with two bottled waters for me and Momma. I pounded the entire bottle, furtively popped a Valium I found in my wallet, closed my eyes, and thought of the once displaced Buffalo, roaming the green hills of their new island home.