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NOW

 

        Right before he died, Boots Klondike imagined that he was once again on the road with the band, on his way to some small town to unload, tune up, rock out for a couple of hours, get back on the bus, and do it all over again the next day.

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        Lying there in his hospital bed, Boots was sure he could hear the steady haroom of the engine, the whoosh of the tires, and the alternating laughter and soft patter of the Euphonious Echoes, of whom he was the first to die, thus ensuring, all those in the band predicted, his already legendary status in one more highly effective and astonishing way.

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        The vision was so real to Boots that when he thought he heard Lips Freemont, driver and bass player extraordinaire, ask which way to turn, Boots said loudly, “Go left!,” shocking those presently in the room and confusing totally an elderly woman patient in the hall who at that very moment was trying to remember where the bathroom was.

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           “What’d you say, Dad?” asked his daughter Rita, who was less surprised by the seemingly nonsensical utterance than by the vehemence with which her father got it out.

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            And although Boots was dimly aware of a female voice, the incongruity of it with what he thought were his present surroundings was so strange that he imagined it as the fantasy, and the vision as reality.

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            Try as he might, Boots couldn’t seem to recall the band’s current destination, although he had always prided himself on remembering the name of every town they played, believing that if the audience was willing to shell out money to see them, the least he could do was be sure of where the hell he was.

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            “Damn if it doesn’t look like New Haven,” Boots muttered. Well, I’m on my way somewhere, he thought, and with tears of expectancy forming at the edges of his eyes, and the beginning of what he perceived to be a strange and wonderful new tune percolating in his head, Boots began to whistle and drifted effortlessly out of the world...But Boots didn’t stay dead for long. He was not yet prepared to meet his --or anyone else’s for that matter-- maker.

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            Shortly after what all familiar with the situation had considered to be, wrongly, as it turned out, his untimely death, Boots opened his eyes, began to breathe, and found himself staring at an ugly print of hunters on horseback chasing a very frightened looking fox, and wondering what time it was.

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         Rita, suddenly Boots’ bereaved (she believed) daughter, was the only person in the hospital room when her father began to make definite, increasingly vile, noises. Having never before actually witnessed a human death, Rita was nevertheless intimately familiar with many of the associated physical manifestations, a result of her avid viewing and cultivation of the film noir genre since an early age.

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          All of which is to say that although Rita believed she knew a death rattle when she heard it, she felt less secure in the area of death belching, causing her to wonder if she was witnessing a medical phenomenon or simply watching the wrong kind of movie.

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            When Boots sat up suddenly and asked her what time it was, before she could think, Rita said loudly, “3:30,” dropped to her knees, and began to recite the lyrics to Help Me, Rhonda, one of her favorite songs and in her moment of panic temporarily confused with The Lord’s Prayer.

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            “Your voice gets better every day, little girl,” said Boots, as yet unaware that, as far as Rita and the world was concerned, his voice was gone. “If only your mother were here to hear you sing like that.”

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            Her sense of reality now completely shaken, Rita, upon hearing her increasingly alive father mention her very dead mother, was afraid Boots was invoking that woman’s spirit, and expected to see her female parent come through the hospital door, zombie-like, with arms outstretched and in her favorite dress with pictures of fruit on it hanging in tatters like some malignant, rotting dessert.

           

             “Why have you come back?,” Rita yelled at her father, hoping that a line of direct questioning would bring things into perspective, once again turning to her knowledge of (cinematic) law enforcement for aid in her time of crisis.

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              Boots, still unconscious of the fact that he was instilling terror in the heart of his only child, and confused by the question in his still tenuous mental state, said, “I must have come back for you,” unwittingly tapping into Rita’s worst fear and causing her to run from the room as though the ghost of Elvis himself was tripping at her heels.

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              Left thus alone, and slowly returning to his pre-death, Boots-like state, the 50-something singer/songwriter began to wonder what the hell he was doing in the hospital.

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               He hated the places, despite the modest success he’d had several years earlier with Your Hypocritical Oath, an ironic ode to duplicity that had nothing at all to do with the medical profession but whose tune nevertheless had been purchased, in one of those on-the-surface peculiar twists of fate that were in fact more simple and less out-of-the-ordinary than always around us all the time, to serve as background music for a series of Red Cross public service announcements.

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            Turning around to his right to get a better sense of his surroundings, Boots felt a sharp twinge in his left leg, a hop of his heart, almost knocked the IV drip to the floor, and then, suddenly, remembered the car crash.

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            The memory came all at once, like a shrill, unexpected phone call at 5 a.m., and Boots could almost smell, hear, taste the sensory impressions as they surrounded his consciousness: fire, screams, blood, nothingness.

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            “Fuckin’ A,” he thought. “I’m dead.”

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            But Boots didn’t believe in an afterlife, and even in his moments of doubt hadn’t pictured Heaven as an uncomfortable hospital bed in an undetermined location. And Hell wouldn’t have a TV. Or would it?

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            Boots was prepared to ponder this question further, and maybe even write a song about it, when Rita and several distressed medical personnel stormed into the room, carrying an assortment of medical equipment and what looked to Boots like a Bible.

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            More agitated than ever due to her difficulties in conveying to the hospital staff the possibility that her parents had become zombies, Rita edged her way around the bed and peered closely at Boots, who proceeded to give her the special wink that had been reserved for her since infancy.

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         Rather than scaring her further, this gesture touched Rita deeply and immediately erased any doubts she had of her father’s corporeal existence.

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         “It’s definitely him!,” she exclaimed, simultaneously invoking the true depth of her feeling and providing Boots with the title of a future hit, which he, artist that he was, transformed from the current sentiment regarding his health to another finely crafted expression of human love and devotion.

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                                                                        #   #   #

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            “You were dead,” Rita said, having calmed down and stopped looking in the corners for shrunken heads or chicken feathers, vestiges of the voodoo rituals a small part of her still suspected may have taken place not much earlier.

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            “I’m fine, how are you?,” said Boots, anxious to get on with his restored life, but continuing to struggle with the memory fragments of disaster which hovered at the edges of his brain like an inept roadie trying to get his attention from the edge of the stage.

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            “We really were afraid we’d lost you,” interjected a man from the midst of the white-clothed assembly: Dr. Peter Robert, head of emergency medicine for the Good Samaritan Hospital in Winsome Lake, New York.

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            A purely scientific type, the good doctor had convinced himself the Bible he was carrying-- which Boots had eyed moments earlier --served a medicinal purpose, to soothe the overwrought daughter. He kept the Good Book in his top drawer, along with his stethoscope, merely as a precautionary measure, he told himself daily.

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            “You were in pretty bad shape when you were brought in here last night,” Dr. Robert reiterated. “You’d lost a lot of blood, and your vital signs were unstable. It’s actually remarkable to see you sitting up.”

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            “I’m feeling pretty stable now, Doc, and will gladly arm wrestle you to prove it, but you’ll have to put down that Bible,” said Boots, anxious to appear his usual truculent self despite a rising fear that something had indeed been very wrong with him.

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            “That won’t be necessary,” said Dr. Robert, who quickly, and, he hoped, unobtrusively, handed the volume to his closest aide. “But I would like to ask you a few questions and take a look at you a bit more closely.”

            “I don’t bite,” said Boots, a pronouncement believed by virtually no one in the room except the patient himself.

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            “Dad, stop scaring everyone, behave yourself, and let the doctor do his work,” yelled Rita, who, despite what she’d seen of her father’s physical trauma, was now beginning to wonder if the entire incident had not been concocted for publicity purposes, so very alive had he become.

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            “Anything you say, Peep,” Boots said. “I just want to get the fuck out of here.”

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            Boots’ use of her childhood nickname in combination with his favorite obscenity served once again to placate Rita, whose irritation was replaced with a combination of conflicting emotions she’d long since come to recognize as love for her male parent.

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            “That’s what we want, too,” said Dr. Robert, who by now was less concerned by the slippage of his professional demeanor than he was by the fear he hadn’t been subtle enough.

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            “Nice bedside manner,” said Boots, who as he uttered the phrase began to rethink it as Bedside Manor, a possible song title a la Heartbreak Hotel, or a new chain of cozy inns whose creation might foster further finances.

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            “Do you remember what happened to you?,” asked Dr. Robert, ignoring the jab and opting for the direct approach, bolstered by the IV drip which he was fairly sure would slow the patient down in case of any sudden movement.

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            “Yes,” said Boots, suddenly quiet, for the images once again came rushing in, blurred, violent, then focused. “How’s Lips?,” he asked almost before he knew what the words meant.

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            “Your friend is fine but rather bruised; the two of you are perhaps the luckiest pair I’ve ever seen,” said the doctor, amid murmurs of assent from his Geek Chorus, the collection of sycophantic colleagues/aides who alternated between supporting him whenever anyone outside their immediate circle was present and sneaking in to his office at off hours to play with his expensive swivel chair and admire the view.

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            “Where is he?” Boots asked more loudly, looking around the room at the scattered medical personnel.

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            “He’s just down the hall, offering to show passersby his scars,” said Dr. Robert.

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            “Long live rock,” whispered Rita, almost to herself. More loudly, she said, “his arm is broken, Dad. But the doctor said he’ll be able to play again.”

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            “Really? He never could before,” joked Boots, who, assured that his longtime friend, band-mate and songwriting partner was alive and relatively well, let out a loud sigh of relief that sounded enough like a growl to make each chorus member take a small step backward.

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            “Can I see him?” he asked.

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            “Neither of you is well enough to move just yet,” said Dr. Robert.

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            Convinced of this fact by his increasing pain, intermittent disorientation, and inability to get anywhere near comfortable, an always desirable destination, Boots was nothing if not stubborn. He knew the doctor had his best interests at heart, and even was coming to feel some sympathy for the medical professional, but he had a reputation to uphold, and cantankerousness, after all, came pretty easily to him.

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            “When will we be, and when will we get the hell out?” Boots asked.

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            “You both have undergone severe traumas, and will need to stay for at least several days to undergo observation. I will, however, assign a nurse to your case to make your recovery more comfortable,” said the doctor, unwittingly setting in motion a series of profound events that would affect Boots for the rest of his days, which, it turns out, were to be in ample supply.

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            Secretly relieved, Boots instead said, “I’d rather have a date,“ also unaware that fate was alive and well and visiting Good Samaritan.              

                              

            Ten minutes later, Rita found herself walking down the corridor to visit Lips, wondering, as she always did when she visited hospitals, why they smelled like a not particularly winning combination of disinfectant and dysentery.

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            Following her father’s needlessly rude performance in front of the well-meaning doctor, Rita had had enough, and told Boots that if he did not apologize immediately, his near-death experience would take on a more permanent flavor.

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            “You slay me,” roared Boots, who while often confused by his daughter rarely felt threatened by her.

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            “Precisely,” said Rita, who with a gaze of singular force inherited from her mother convinced Boots she meant to have her way, consequences be damned.

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            Boots told Dr. Robert he was sorry, and the physician extracted a promise from his patient that a thorough examination would be allowed in the near future.

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            That settled, Rita set out to see Lips: surrogate uncle, dedicated musician, mischief-maker supreme. As she searched for the right room number, (or the doorway with the line forming to the left), the strong emotions of the day caused Rita to flash on her first full memory of the band, thirty-one years previously...

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            “Dusty Springfield,” said Boots.

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            He and the other Euphonious Echoes were in the Klondike living room, surrounded by a beautiful but cold Winsome Lake night. Lips was singing Love Me Do in a high, whiny voice (although the adjective he would have preferred was “lilting”) that did not at all resemble the record her father played again and again, day after day, caught in the trance of the magnificent moptops.

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            Rita watched enthralled from the top of the stairs, her pajama-encased feet kicking furiously at the sheer pleasure of this bizarre adult ritual.

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            Lips shook his head vigorously at his partner’s suggestion and warbled on.

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            “Carmen Miranda,” yelled Sparks Palmer, the Euphonious Echoes’ lead guitar player who, as usual when he got excited, was jumping up and down in ever higher arcs on the battered Klondike couch.

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            “DYLAN!!” screamed Smarts Edison, the group’s unwavering drummer.

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            “You can’t always guess ‘Dylan,’” shouted the others in unison, glaring at their compatriot.

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            “It’s right sometimes,” said the unfazed Smarts.

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            These actions, rituals and emotions were a mystery to the increasingly thrilled Rita, who, at the age of five, was as yet uninitiated in the ways and wonders of modern culture and complex social interaction.

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            Clamorous and confusing as this downstairs scene seemed, Rita by instinct knew the adults were having fun; the scent of danger was absent from the proceedings.

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            It was not until years later, and after repeated viewings, however, that Rita was able to put a name to the competition. The Euphonious Echoes were playing NOTE-IFIED, an original game invented by her father, in which a famous song was vocalized in the style of someone other than the original artist, and the players had three guesses in which to determine who the guest singer was supposed to be.

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            Rita herself had grown up to become a champion NOTE-IFIED competitor, still famous in the Euphonious Echoes’ circle for the occasion in which she was able to deduce that Sparks was attempting to sing Clapton’s Lay Down Sally in the manner of all three Bee Gees.

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            “It was something in his eyes,” had been her only explanation, the vagueness of which added to the respect she earned that day.

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            Still, it was that initial game that Rita recalled most fondly, for the feelings of wonder and delight the memory was still able to induce.

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            “Alright, then, who is it,” Smarts had asked. “Our three guesses are up.”

            Sparks stopped jumping on the cushions as Lips stopped singing, looked his bandmates in the eyes, and said “Sam Cooke, of course.”

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            “I was gonna SAY Sam Cooke,” said Boots.

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            “But you SAID Dusty Springfield,” mocked Sparks.

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            “At least I didn’t guess someone who is most famous for wearing fruit on her head,” answered Boots, who in actuality had thought Carmen Miranda was not a bad guess.

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            “Now, boys,” said Daphne Bell, Boots’ first wife and mother of Rita, from her usual remote corner of the living room where she had been silently observing the game. “Play nice.”

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            Startled to hear Daphne point these familiar words at her father instead of in her own direction, Rita giggled, at which point all five heads turned to see her perched in the upstairs hall.

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            “What are you doing up, you little monster,” her mother asked, and this time Rita knew it was she who was being addressed. “It is way-y-y past your bedtime.”

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            Daphne got up from her chair and started towards the stairs, and Rita scampered off to her room. As she got to the doorway, she turned to the assembled crowd below and declared proudly, “I know who Bob Dylan is,” producing looks of astonishment to appear on all except Smarts, who smiled triumphantly.

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#   #   #   #

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            Walking down the hospital hallway, Rita felt these memories come rushing back, not in a linear, chronological fashion, but in fast, disconnected, persistent images, bouncing off the neurons in her brain. Pinball blizzard, she thought.

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            Reaching room 207, Rita did not find a horde of scar-happy fans. Instead, she was surprised at how quiet her surroundings were, so accustomed was she to the swirl of life that usually defined the tumultuous Lips.

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            “I want to see the lovely Rita!,” yelled Lips from inside the hospital room, as though reading her mind, for he could not yet see her.

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            “Here I am!,” Rita said, turning the corner and springing into his room. “My, don’t we sound healthy.”

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            “Never better, unless you want to factor in my recent negative brush with moving technology,” said Lips. “I’d ask you to kiss me, but I just broke my arm.”

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            Rita, ignoring the convoluted Bette Davis reference, gave Lips a peck on the cheek. As she did so, she took the opportunity to look more closely at her lifelong friend and mentor.

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            No longer the swaggering young musician, Lips was nevertheless a rugged, unconventional 56-year-old. He no longer smoked cigarettes, his drink of choice was Diet Pepsi, and he ached in more joints than he rolled, but Lips had been at Woodstock – the first one -- and retained a firm grip on his Bohemian citizenship card.

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            Still, he looked a bit worn down, thought Rita, who suddenly remembered that she had no idea what actually had happened to her father and friend. “For Christ’s sake, what were you guys doing?” she said.

            “Well, we hadn’t had our names in the paper for a few months, so we decided to drum up some interest,” said Lips.

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            “I don’t think this is funny; my father was actually dead for awhile,” said Rita, who as she heard the words emanate from her mouth began finally to believe it.

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            “No shit; was I in the will?” asked Lips.

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            This renewed mention of her father’s recent almost-passing caused Rita to do something she disliked doing: she began to cry, loudly and with uncontrolled fury.

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            Rita’s tears stunned Lips, who was used to teasing her to no apparent ill effect. When he realized that Boots had actually been in danger, he cursed himself for making his beloved Rita unhappy.

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            “I’m sorry, honey,” he said. “The doctor simply told me that your dad had been hurt but now was okay. I never would have joked about it if I’d known how serious it was. You know that, don’t you?”

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            “You bastards were in a car wreck! How could it not be serious,” said Rita, the day’s on-again, off-again anger now beginning to settle into tired exasperation.

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            “Was the car hurt?” asked Lips tentatively, who joked in spite of himself and with a sense that Rita almost expected it of him.

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            “I want to know what happened, and I want to know now,” Rita said.

            “Well, you won’t like it, but this is what went down,” said Lips,

adjusting himself carefully in his bed so he could look at her. “Your dad and I stayed at the studio late last night. On the way home, I was driving, and the last part of Abbey Road came on the radio.”

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            “Oh no, you didn’t,” said Rita, knowing full well what was coming.

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            “You know we did, but let me tell it,” Lips said, irritated and ashamed all at once. “When the guitar medley came on, where Paul, John and George trade off licks, your father started to play air guitar, identifying who he thought was playing which part. I disagreed, and took my hands off the wheel to show him why he was wrong. It was late, we were tired, and the next thing we knew we were here.”

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            “That’s the dumbest story I’ve ever heard,” declared Rita.

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            “You’re only 36; give it time,” Lips said.

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            “I can’t believe you guys are still having this stupid argument. Now it’s gotten to the point where you almost got killed over it. Can’t you just let it be?” screamed Rita.

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            “Actually, Let It Be was made just before Abbey Road,” Lips said.

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            Before she actually knew it was going to happen, Rita let out a scream that caused several car alarms to go off in the parking lot immediately outside the window of Lips’ room.

Continued on Next Page

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