Spiral

bowl’?”
    The eyes behind another cloud of smoke went sad for a minute. ”Band usually got just one songwriter. Couple bands—Beatles, now, best example—they had two or three doing it. Spiral, for most of the good tunes, it was more like a collaboration.”
    ”Meaning you all contributed to the writing.”
    ”Some more than others.”
    ”And you more than Gordo Lazar?”
    ”Right on again, babe.” The sad look still. ”I didn’t know jackshit about this royalty stuff back then. None of us really did, and I mean most every player from the sixties, early seventies. Wasn’t till some bands got lawyers to watch their managers, and then other lawyers to watch their first lawyers, any of us knew what the hell was going down.”
    I waited a moment before, ”Yet you signed on for the comeback.”
    The cagey look again. ”I sign on for the money. Mitch, he track me down through the union, tell me he got Spi’s daddy to bankroll us for another album—or CD, shit, it’s still just music for the masses, dig?”
    ”So your heart’s not exactly in it.”
    ”Wasn’t never my heart.” A change of tone. ”You get to be good foxhole buddies with some brothers over in Vietnam?” I thought back, more to the streets of Saigon than the bush. Dave Waters during Tet, Calvin Mildredge losing an arm, Luther—
    ”Hey, babe?”
    ‘Yeah, I had black friends there.”
    ”Well, then, you got a lot farther along the road of racial harmony than Spi. He was one major pain in the butt, that way.”
    ”Racist?”
    ”More just resentful. He knowed how much I help him out on the keyboard with the arrangement of his tunes, but he also knowed he don’t have to share none of the royalties. So there always be this... curtain, like, between us.”
    ”Same with the others in the band?”
    ”Have to ask them, babe.” Biggs stubbed out his cigarette on top of the can before dropping it through the hole. I got to be going.”
    ”What about that third smoke?”
    Biggs looked up, the eyes now more baleful than sad. ”You see these here things on my neck?”
    The left hand went toward his collar.
    ”I see them.”
    ”You know what they are?”
    ”I’m not a doctor.”
    ”No? Well, you know what this is, right?”
    Pointing now at the red ribbon on his chest.
    ”I do.”
    ”Got diagnosed two years ago.” A pause. ”Don’t know how I got it, except I hadn’t been doing no horse for a long while, so I don’t believe it was from a needle. But the doctors, they don’t really know shit about that. They do know one thing, though. There’s these pills can keep you healthy.”
    ”Veronica Held had a drug in her body that wasn’t so healthy.”
    ”Not from me, babe. Onliest drugs I take now are that AIDS cocktail and my nicotine. Plus”—his hand went toward the water—”I swim every day in that pool, hour at a time. Ever since we all moved in here.”
    That stopped me. ”Moved in?”
    ”Spi’s daddy, he hire you, but he don’t tell you we all bunking at his son’s crib?”
    ”No.”
    The raspy laugh. ”Rich man know how to save money. He backing the band, but he also paying on this house for Spi. He figure his boy’s band can stay here, not run up the room service at some hotel, or maybe trash the place like the old days.” Now the baleful look again. ”You ask me before about my ‘heart’ not being in this comeback. Let me tell you where my heart is, babe. I doing this gig for the money, account of the money let me buy the pills and leave some left over for my son.”
    ”Kalil.”
    A pause. ”Kalil. I take those pills and I swim the laps, keep me strong so I can stay around long enough to maybe see him growed up.” Another pause. ”And maybe not. But I tell you the truth here so’s maybe the money train don’t stop running.”
    ”Meaning, so that Nicolas Helides keeps backing the band.”
    ”Babe, you work for him, I work for him. I help you out, you don’t upset my applecart, dig?”
    ”I can’t promise that.”
    Biggs rose from the chair, but a little unsteadily. ”Wasn’t looking for no promise. Just an understanding.”
    ”I could use some more answers.”
    ”Later, you want. I got to go pick up my son at the specialist.”
    ”Specialist?”
    ”Another reason I need this gig. Kalil see a speech specialist.”
    ”What’s the impediment?”
    ”Don’t use that term no more. ‘Stigmatizes,’ they say. Only they still call themselves speech ‘pathologists,’ which seem to me