Spiral

than maybe medicinally.” Another sniffle. ”What with Very and all.”
    ”I’m sorry for your loss.”
    ”Oh, man, ‘loss’ don’t quite cover the situation, you know? I was ready for a comeback—the fuck’s the word? Poised. Yeah, yeah, I was poised for a comeback. Mitch wanted to call it ‘The Spiral Revival Tour,’ ‘cause he thinks he’s got this talent for naming shit” Held looked at me. ”Mitch called here, said he talked to you already this morning?”
    ”We talked.”
    A sly look. ”Yeah, well, Mitch told you he came up with the name for the band, right?”
    ”Something like that.”
    More of the sly look. ”You don’t give away much, do you, man?”
    ”I’m more in the finding-out business.”
    ”Yeah, well, let me help you find this out. Mitch got me started back then, all right. I had no connections, and he had some. But I was the one came up with the name Spiral, just like I changed mine.”
    A minute ago we were mourning his daughter. ”From Spiro Helides.”
    ”Right. To Spi Held. Then everybody started doing it. That guy Sting from the Police, you think that’s his real name? Fuck, I’m surprised my dad didn’t change his, too.”
    I wasn’t. ”You were talking about the ‘Spiral Revival’ idea?”
    A frown now. ”Mitch’s idea, the rhyme gimmick. But in the trade, ‘revival’ kind of—the fuck’s that word, too? Oh, yeah, connotes. In the trade, revival connotes just going on the road with your oldies, like some washed-up group from the sixties. Not for Spiral, man. I was composing new tunes, something to make everybody in the biz stand up and take notice.”
    ”A comeback.”
    It was like Held’s whole body nodded. ”Now we’re riding the same wave.”
    I thought about his daughter’s body in her grandfather’s pool.
    ”You cold or something, man?”
    ”No,” I said. ”How solid was this comeback idea of yours?”
    ”Solid? I had seven tunes finished. In the can, as the Hollywood types would say. Very and the band did one of them as a demo video. I figured to add two more fresh tracks, then fill out the CD with some of our big seventies numbers, like maybe ‘Downward’ and ‘Upward,’ you know?”
    ”You wrote these new songs?”
    His body language went a little defensive. ”Yeah.”
    Time for some quality control on what Held was feeding me. ”Does that mean the lyrics, too?”
    A moment before, ”Uh-unh.” His eyes went to the guitar. ”I hear the music better than the words, man. O’D used to do our lyrics, but Very helped out some on the newbies.
    ”How important was your daughter to the comeback itself?”
    Held closed his eyes now, and two tears—one on each side of his nose—began rolling toward the mustache. ”God, she had the talent. I saw it maybe two, three times my whole professional life. Joplin, Mama Cass, Benatar. Very’s middle name was ‘Janis,’ out of my respect for the lady, you hear me?” Held’s head shook without the eyes opening. ”Very, Very. You saw her on stage, you’d forget about everybody else up there. They say it comes down through the genes.” His left hand cupped the cutoffs at his crotch. ”I’m talking the DNA shit here, not dungarees.” A solemn tone now. ‘Very could have taken Spiral back to the top, man.”
    ”I know this is hard for—”
    ”Hard?” The eyes flapped open violently, like old-fashioned window shades. ”What’s hard is it’s so fucking... unfair. All those years, watching guys with half my talent ride the crest of disco. Stupid music for greasers in polyester suits trying to dance like Fred and Ginger under whirling globes. Man, I could write the real shit, the real music, and I could play guitar better’n anybody except maybe Clapton and a couple others.”
    ”Mr. Held?”
    He seemed to catch his breath. ”What?”
    ”After you followed your daughter from the living room the party, what happened?”
    ”What happened? What do you think? Jeanette and me caught up to her in that hallway near the pool. I asked Very what the fuck she was doing, going on in front of my dad like that. She told me to fuck off. Her own father.”
    Imagine that. ”And then?”
    ”Jeanette could see I was ripshit, so she dragged me back toward the living room, talk with my dad.”
    ”And the next time you saw Veronica... ?”
    ”Was when Tranh’s yelling brought a bunch of us to the pool. I was there second behind Ricky, and—”
    ”Ricky Queen?”
    ”Of course, Ricky Queen.