1 thought she was the only girl for me …
(Awoo-oo-oo, cry the halt and the lame.)
When she left I was as lonesome as could be …
(Awoo-oo-oo, even Freaky Freddy joining in.)
But then in my rearview I saw your lips
I could have pulled my U-ie on a poker chip
You gave a little wave with your fingertips
And then I got a look at your pouting lips
(And Dewey stomps up from his vocal basement, a-pow-pow-pow, you got to …)
Kiss me, Karen,
kiss, kiss, me Karen
(Awoo-oo, pow-pow)
Let’s face it, ladies and gentlemen, the chorus to perhaps my most famous songs does nothing but go “Kiss me, Karen” over and over again. It is the popular song equivalent of a circle jerk in the shower room, but it does possess a certain urgency. The father hated the song, between takes he’d lean back and roar, “Kiss him, Karen, for Christ’s sake!” Even Dan disliked the song, he pulled me aside and said, “Desmo, I got to tell you, kissing this girl was like sucking a sponge.” He didn’t know we’d passed into the realm of art. All I knew is that it made a lot of sense rhythmically if five young men chanted “Kiss me, Karen” over and over again, but great care had to be taken not to get boring. So what did I do? I got positively baroque. Freaky Freddy couldn’t feed me empty tracks fast enough. There’s as many as fifty separate voices on that chorus, they weave in and out, collide like bumper cars. Freddy set up Sal Goneau’s drum kit in an adjunctive garage, he ladled on heaps of echo and phasing, the result sounded like someone taking out their trash in the Twilight Zone. Dewey’s bass was fine-tuned electronically until it achieved awesome purity. Monty still had his special screwdriver-altered amplifier (he dared not bring another, lest Fred Head pull a similar stunt), and I was by this time much enamoured of electronics myself, I’d rigged up a special pre-amp that functioned as a sort of overdrive, forcing too much juice into the speakers, so that what finally trickled out was high-octane white gold.
Yes sir, I don’t believe the Howl Brothers ever functioned as well again as we did that day. It was magic, it was a time we’d spend years trying to rediscover. Magic is a hard thing to hold on to.
But we had it that day. When we were finished recording “Kiss Me, Karen” b/w “My Baby Burnt Out My Clutch,” Kenneth Sexstone pranced to the middle of the room and said,“Thank you, boys. You have just made me filthy rich.” We all started to grin. Even the father grinned, despite what was happening to him in the outside world, where the piece of granite he used for a heart was getting shattered. The father grinned because he knew what was about to happen. Within two weeks of its release, the record was number one in the United States of America.
Success, success, it’s time for all hell to break loose!
You can take my word for it, it certainly is fun, at least for a while, being one of the more famous people in the world. For one thing, people notice you. Complete strangers stop dead in their tracks and gawk, people who under other circumstances wouldn’t give you the time of day. Do you know that feeling, when you’re buying shoes, and the clerk is racing here and there, up to nothing more, it seems, than ignoring you? Well, become famous and those guys will race out onto the sidewalk with all sizes and colours balanced on their heads. And as for girls, my my. Formerly my interaction with the opposite sex was largely stammered inanities. It didn’t take long before I was talking to them like Danny: “Oh, hi, Caroline. You’re looking very sweet today. Say, Caroline, do you think that if we were to step into that bus shelter over there you could give me a little bee-jay?”
We were on the cover of magazines, the five of us grinning like idiots from newsstands across the nation. We had to do countless interviews, and it was at one such interview that I made the reacquaintance of the strange kid with the too-big glasses, Geddy Cole. His spectacles were no longer oversized, his acne was clearing a bit, but he was still a startlingly odd chap. He worked for a rag called Rockin Rods a music/car journal, a genre that flourished at the same time we did (no coincidence), and Geddy Cole demanded to know my preferences in clothes, food and automobiles. I had stock answers for all these, citing Monty Mann’s taste in clothes, Danny’s in automobiles, my own in food. When the interview was done, Geddy asked if I wanted to go “catch some tunes.” Geddy and I had shared some scrawny cigarettes, zombie reefer it was, and the notion of “catching tunes” appealed to me, so the strange kid and I went out. Before we went, though, Geddy reached into his pocket and removed some pills. Oblong pills, bright yellow.
“Take a few of these, Des,” said Geddy.
Another pharmaceutical adventure for Desmond Howl. These magic pills seemed to put me on equal footing with the universe.
Geddy took me to a cavernous nightclub, the band and most of the patronage black. The group was The Lamont Brothers, three men of such disparate aspect that, if they were not lying about their relationship, Mrs. Lamont’s character would have to be questioned. The most memorable of the back-up musicians was the sax player, an overly tall boy of about seventeen. He was dressed in a pink tuxedo and ruffled shirt, as though he expected at any moment to be pressed into marriage.
This was the first player who I had ever heard go outside. Do you know what I’m talking about? A solo is like a little door in the song, and most instrumentalists step over the stoop, see what the weather’s like and duck back in. This young fellow, he ran out that door, sprinted around the block, he took the cross-town bus and hired a cab back. Granted, I was so zombied at the time perhaps Lawrence Welk would have sounded as good, but it was a critical experience for me.
After the set, Geddy Cole waved some members of the band over to the table, and they joined us, because Geddy had a reputation for holding good dope and was more than willing to spring for drinks. The sax player joined us, he brought his horn with him and throughout the break he toyed silently with the levers and buttons, his long fingers popping pads. He was introduced as Mooky Saunders. When he heard my name he raised his eyebrows. “You write that ‘Kiss Me, Karen’ thing?”
I nodded.
“Shee-yut,” said Mooky Saunders, grinning at me. “When you gonna fawk that woman, Desmond?”
When, indeed? Fay Ginzburg and I had kept up a correspondence throughout my ascension. Our letters were little more than basic rundowns on the weather and such, but I did notice something interesting happen to her sign-offs. They began with “Your friend,” then they gained this long-lasting character, “Ever your friend,” then those cute little x’s and o‘s started mushrooming, then the word appeared, “Love, Fay,” then “Lots o’ love, Fay,” and finally she was writing “All my love, Fay.” We had a big concert scheduled for Sausalito. Fay and I agreed we would see each other afterwards and, in her almost illegibly scrawled words, “talk seriously.”
So though it might seem that all was right with the world, such was not the case. It was Daniel who pointed out that something was very odd. “Desmo,” he asked me one night, “are you rich?”
“Rich?”
“Yeah, rich. Do you have a lot of money?”
I took some out of my pocket, thinking that he was soliciting a loan. “I got maybe forty bucks, Dan-Dan. You need it?”
“Desmo, you wrote ‘Kiss Me, Karen’?”
“Yes.”
“It sold a million or three?”
“Yes.”
“Desmo, why ain’t you a milly-un-aire?”
The father seemed to be prepared for us. He was standing at the top of the stairway in his dressing-gown, smoke from a cigarette curling around his head. The father hadn’t shaved for weeks, but his whiskers were (like him) feckless things, they fuzzed up the soft lines of his face but stopped quite a distance short of becoming a beard. The father’s eyes raged. He pointed a finger at Dan and myself, riveting us in the foyer. “I made you!” the father screamed, “Just don’t forget that. Without me there is no Howl Brothers!”
“Daddy—” I began.
Danny cut me short. “What have you been up to, old man?”
“You boys.” The father shook his head wistfully. “So young, so carefree. You don’t know nothing about the way the world works. You don’t know business. You don’t even know how to copyright your own tunes. So, because I’m your father, I’m doing it for you.”
“Copyright them how?”
“Copyright them under Howell Music, Inc., what did you expect?”
“Who do you list as the writer?” shouted Danny.
“He’s screwing us, Des.”
“You boys were underage, you couldn’t sign no contracts. What does it matter what it says on a piece of paper? It might say that I wrote a song, what does it matter?”
“I can’t believe this,” muttered Danny. “This is unreal.”
“Don’t worry, I’m setting aside money for you boys. You’re my sons. Besides, what do you need money for? Beer money, poontang money, that you got. What else do you need?”
This was certainly a kick in the head. The man at the top of the stairs suddenly weaved like a blade of grass blown by wind. I realized that he had been drinking.
“Besides, the stuff is shit,” said the father. “Think about my reputation.”
Danny suddenly said, “Is Maurice Mantle in on this little scam?”
“Maurice,” said my father. “Moe-fucking-reese? Moe-reese don’t know shit from sushi.”
“So you’re screwing us, and you’re screwing him.”
“I am not screwing you boys,” said the father. He sat down on the top stair. “Now, Maurice,” mused the father, “Maurice I’m screwing.” He had softened suddenly. “You see,” he said calmly, for the billionth time in his puny existence, “when a song hits big, then you’ll be sitting on Easy Street.”
“Where’s Mom?” I asked.
“Just never mind where your bimbo mother is. You boys are like your mother, do you know that, you got no consideration for my feelings, you just think you can do whatever you want and never mind if someone should get hurt.”
“Mommy is with Mr. Mantle?” I asked, or realized and spoke unwittingly.
“Affirmative, Desmond. You’re pretty smart for a jagoff.”
“Well, that’s too bad—” said Dan.
“Don’t give me too bad, Daniel. Do not stand there and give me too bad.” The father stood up wearily. “We’re a bunch of flies on a shitpile and it’s got nothing to do with too bad because it’s all …” He lost his train of thought, the father grabbed ahold of the bannister. “So what do I get out of it? I get all the fucking money, boys. That’s not much to ask. I get all the fucking money. I’m headed for Easy Street.” The father turned, headed for his den. “I made you!” he hollered.
The father was a victim of limited imagination, that’s what Daniel said. Immediately after this encounter, Dan and I made for the bars, the scuz palaces. My brother and I pounded boilermakers in the company of lepers. Naked women paraded before us. Humanity’s last-ditch attempt to keep a lid on things.
“What,” said my brother, “a dipshit.”
“Why did he do it?” I wondered aloud.
“Why? ’Cause he had to.”
“Had to?”
“Man, he fed her all these stories. How great everything was gonna be. When a song fucking hits big. The way I see it, he had no choice.”
“So mom wanted money …”
“Desmond, you’re the same as the old man. You got a limited imagination. Mom never wanted money. She wanted fairy tales.” Danny took a moment to whistle a nearly-naked woman over to the curtain of the stage. He stuck a fifty-dollar bill into her g-string. “There’s more than one kind of goddam story. Didn’t the old man ever hear of love stories?”