The Call of the Mild

Chapter Twelve

Henry Spencer raised the sticks high above his head. And waited. He’d torn the sleeves out of his sweatshirt to give his arms complete freedom, and tied a bandanna around his forehead to keep the sweat out of his eyes, and pulled on jeans that hadn’t fit in ten years because-well, he wasn’t quite sure why they’d told him to do that. But this was the moment he’d been dreaming of for weeks, the instant he’d rehearsed in his head time after time. Around him, the three others waited, poised just like him, waiting for the computerized keyboard to finish its preprogrammed run. Then they’d all kick in.

Henry Spencer had never wanted to be a rock star. He’d never yearned to be onstage with a Stratocaster between his legs and thousands of fans screaming at his every move. He’d never learned to pick out the opening notes of “Stairway to Heaven” on the display model in the guitar store or stood in front of his mirror practicing the front-footed stance unique to rock gods and Jack Kirby superheroes.

In his teens, in fact, Henry was almost completely oblivious to music. While his high school buddies were rocking around the clock or shaking their money maker or getting their groove thang on, Henry was doing his homework or attending practice for whichever sport was in season. He was vaguely aware that there were such things as radios, and that they tended to blare out their noise wherever he happened to be, but none of it made any more impression on him than the sound of traffic in the distance.

It wasn’t that Henry disliked music. It was just that it was a distraction, and Henry never had time for anything that would take him away from his chosen path.

At least until that path reached its end.

Although Henry liked to think of himself as the same driven man he’d been before he retired, his mind and body were beginning to rebel against the decades of discipline. He told himself that it was important he continue to rise every morning at five seventeen, but his physical self knew there was no actual reason to wake before the sun, and his hand had started to hit the snooze before his training could stop it. When he set out for a quick six-mile jog, his legs began to suggest it might be nicer to stroll before they’d hit the halfway mark.

Henry was mature enough to expect the physical changes age was inevitably bringing, but the mental ones were a continual shock. And none was more shocking than what happened the day he was cruising the manager’s specials at the Food Giant looking for a discounted steak that was still hours away from its expiration.

He noticed the song playing over the sound system.

Except that he didn’t just notice it. He recognized it. Recognized that it was called “Me and You and a Dog Named Boo” and that it concerned a young man who traveled across the country in an old car, without any destination in mind. Henry tried to tell himself that he must have noticed the song in his teens because its philosophy of aimless wandering annoyed him so much, but that didn’t explain why he had just caught himself humming the tune. And it didn’t explain why his foot was tapping under his shopping cart, or why he suddenly knew that the song’s singer would end up in Los Angeles only to feel that restless urge to hit the road again.

Even though the minutes were counting down until his manager’s special steak would expire, Henry stayed in the aisle until the song ended and the next one began. To his shock, he realized he knew this song, too. Even though the lyrics made no logical sense, Henry was now aware that he’d long felt great sympathy for a balloon seller named Levon whose only sin was the sincere desire to be a good man.

This was an astonishing discovery for Henry, and he prowled the aisles for an hour, filling his cart with enough groceries to keep him through Christmas as he allowed the sound system to ferry song after song from the depths of his subconscious to the front of his brain.

That shopping trip sent Henry on a six-month odyssey through the annals of pop history. He worked thoroughly and methodically, just as he had when he was investigating murders for the Santa Barbara Police Department. He started by Googling pop charts for the years he was in high school-years, his half hour of scientific research assured him, when pop music has its greatest impact on the human mind-and then plugged those titles into the search box of the iTunes store, playing the free thirty-second sample of each song. If he found he knew the next word after the snippet ended, he’d shell out the ninety-nine cents for the whole thing. By the end of the first week, his computer was bulging with pop hits of the sixties and seventies. He bought himself a tiny iPod and took it along on his runs, and discovered that the pleasure of the music convinced his legs to keep moving.

As his quest went on, Henry found himself moving away from top-40 singles. Apparently the radios blaring in the background of his youth went in for album cuts as well. And this is where his life changed.

The album was called Who’s Next, and he had downloaded it because he recognized a song about what it’s like to live without ever being truly understood-didn’t this exactly match what he’d felt in his teens? If he’d just bought the single he might have listened to it a few times and moved on to “Dark Water” or “Joy to the World.” But he was doing albums now, so he hit the song that followed “Behind Blue Eyes.”

There was no chance that the teenage Henry Spencer would have put up with “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” An anthem blasting all authority as corrupt was simply not something he would have been ready to accept as he dreamed of a life in blue.

But as an adult, Henry was secure enough in his beliefs that he didn’t need to engage a thirty-five-year-old pop song in a political argument. He was caught immediately by the opening guitar chord’s transition into that hypnotic synthesizer riff, and then the crash as the bass, guitar, and drums all kicked in at once. He knew this song. He’d heard it over and over and over again, and somehow he’d never noticed it until this very moment.

It wasn’t until the time counter hit the seven-and-a-half-minute mark that Henry realized he was in trouble. He’d been listening while he was washing the dinner dishes, shuffling his feet roughly in rhythm with the tune, when the guitar, bass, drums, and vocal all dropped out again, leaving only that hypnotic, repeating synth line. Henry was scrubbing a plate when Keith Moon’s drums kicked in.

The plate hit the surface of the water and sent suds flying as Henry’s hands pounded along with the drums. Before he knew what he was doing, he had air-drummed the end of the song.

Henry wheeled around to make sure no one was watching him, although he knew he was alone in the house. What was he doing? He took a deep breath, turned back to the dishes, and vowed never to let this happen again.

But it did. And not just with The Who. If he didn’t keep strict control at all times, his hands would start banging out the rhythms of almost any song. And when he came across Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight,” he knew that no amount of self-control would keep him from drumming the break.

It didn’t take Henry long to understand what was happening: His hands were living the adolescence he’d never allowed them in his youth. And the only way to stop them would be to quit music. Go back to his sound-track-free existence, marching only to the beat of his own internal metronome.

He could do it. He knew he still had the strength. But as soon as he realized that, he understood something else: He didn’t want to. He liked the tunes that filled the empty spaces in his head.

As a lifelong soldier in the fight between chaos and order, Henry knew the most important rule of battle: Either you fight with everything you’ve got, or you surrender. Anything in between does nothing but cause harm to everyone involved.

So Henry surrendered to adolescence. Not permanently, of course, and not in ways that anyone would ever know about. He decided to take one great plunge into a second childhood, knowing that he would climb out feeling refreshed and rejuvenated, and never needing to do it again.

He signed up for a Rock and Roll Fantasy Camp. He’d spend five days in the hills outside Ojai learning to drum from the masters. Not Keith Moon, of course, or John Bonham-drummers, it appeared, tended to have shorter shelf lives than the manager’s specials at Food King. But there were plenty of aging stars who would teach him. And when it was all done, he’d have it out of his system, and no one would ever have to know.

In any other context he probably would have felt nothing but pity for his fellow campers, all middle-age men grasping to retrieve a tiny bit of their youth. But this week wasn’t about judgment; it was about living out a fantasy he’d never even known he had. So for today, Ralph the Lawyer and Fred the Developer and Sid the Dentist were actually Pete and Rog and the Ox. And Henry-for this one shining moment, Henry was Keith Moon.

The doodling synthesizer beats were accelerating. Ralph was warming up his shoulder for the windmilling guitar chords. Fred was swirling his long blond hair-or the long blond hair that existed in his mind, anyway. Sid clutched the fretboard of his bass as if it were about to blast out of his hands.

And Henry was ready. Sticks poised, waiting to slam down on the shining-white drum heads. He’d practiced the solo in his head for months, and now it was almost time.

He raised the drumsticks high over his head. He could feel the rhythm rising in his blood. The moment was now.

And then there was silence.

The synthesizer stopped just before it reached its crescendo. The musicians all looked up, confused, like shuttle astronauts whose liftoff had been aborted without warning.

Henry glanced over at the side of the stage. At the skinny young man who was bending over the synthesizer. Please, no, he prayed, although he knew this one was never going to come true. Please don’t let it be him.

Shawn flipped one last switch and turned to face the band.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Were you guys listening to that?”