Free Whale Music by Paul Quarrington Page A

get mad. I think, hey, slime-bucket, ifthese seagulls are so bad, why did God make so fucking many of them? Don’t you think He knows what He’s doing?”
    “He makes a lot of everything,” I point out. “That may be His way of compensating for engineering and design flaws.”
    “Weird Desmond,” laughs Claire. “He only made the one of you, babe.”

“Torque Torque” was a local hit. It was a hit because the father shoved it down the throat of every disc jockey he could find. It was a hit because, as Kenny Sexstone noted, the youthful record-buying public was very much concerned with automobiles. It was a hit because the young Danny took a good picture, because he looked like a greaseball that would be polite to your mother. It was a hit, in part, because it was a good tune.
    We were the Howl Brothers, the names Des and Danny bracketed underneath on the forty-five. The triumvirate—the father, Maurice Mantle and Kenny Sexstone—decided that we needed a band, that the Howl Brothers had to play live in order to promote the record. They decided to accent our youth, auditioning only people between the ages of fifteen and eighteen.
    The drummer they found was a small, dark-skinned boy named Sal Goneau. His hair-do was something to see, a shiny and intricate sculpture that always looked like it was about to slide off Sally’s head. Sal had a face like a bird, a nose that could be used as a letter-opener. He wore his shirt open to the navel as if proud of the fact that a swarthy Latin type like himselfcould have not a single solitary hair growing anywhere on his person (except for the precarious bouffant perched atop his noggin). Sal wasn’t a very technically competent drummer, but he was awesomely mechanical. Once he got into a groove there was no stopping the lad. I’d pit Sal against a metronome any day of the week and bet good money that the machine broke time before Sally did.
    On bass we had Dewey Moore. Dewey is doing well these days, isn’t he, I believe he was recently voted Country and Western Artist of the Year. And I likewise believe he’s in the Guinness Book of World Records for most marriages. When I first saw him he hadn’t any of this silver-haired dignity for which he is so widely regarded. He was a scrawny, leather-jacketed man with his four-day beard doing a re-enactment of the Civil War. Dewey’s eyes were red and ringed like Saturn. He walked into the auditioning room dragging his bass dolefully. A cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth, little flecks of what looked like vomit spotted his filthy jeans. The triumvirate regarded him sceptically. Finally Maurice asked, “How old are you?”
    Dewey removed the cigarette from his mouth and spoke. His voice sounded like someone was making mud pies in Hell. “Sixteen,” Dewey croaked, and then he strapped on his instrument and commenced to play.
    He got the job, mostly because not a lot of bass players showed up that day.
    The guitarist was, as you probably know, Monty Mann, he of the quote-unquote Californian good looks. What was Californian about his good looks is beyond me. I think of California as ruggedly beautiful, redwoods, jagged coastlines, Big Sur, etc. Monty had a tiny nose, a tiny mouth, tiny ears. I couldn’t look at him without imagining God creating Monty Mann, mincing around like a hairdresser and exclaiming, “Too cute for words!” Danny took a glance at Monty and hated him. I didn’t hate Monty, but I did think he was a lousy guitar player, ruthlessly dragging slothful quarter notes out of his Telecaster,pulling and working at them like they were goobers stuck up some musical nostril.
    The father attended the rehearsals regularly, but he didn’t seem at all concerned with our musical progress. Instead, he’d show up with wardrobe ideas. Where he was getting these “costumes,” I’ll never know. We never had to make a firm veto on any of them because the father was quick to change his own mind. “Naw,”