Excerpt: Twenty-Seven Steps to a Better You

14.

Chris was walking up a small flight of concrete stairs to the front door of a house. It took him a moment to recognize it as the house his parents were living in when he was born. It was a small rancher, tastefully painted blue, with a white wicker chair and a few hanging baskets, overflowing with ivy, the only things that would fit on the porch. He reached for the door. The hand was that of a small child, which made sense, since this was a house he had moved out of at the age of five. It was unlocked, and swung open easily. The house was dark, as if every curtain was drawn. No proper amount of light even penetrated from the open door. He stepped through the door, and was suddenly unable to move at normal speed. His body was stuck in slow motion. The door behind him slammed shut, and he realized that he was the only thing moving at this speed. He began to panic, and slowly swam to the left, toward his parents' bedroom door. The door opened slowly, and he was met with a horrifying assortment of Muppets, goblins, and bogeymen, pouring from every corner of the room. They pounced from in the closet and under the bed.

Chris let out a silent scream, and he tried to run as best he could. He could feel them breathing down his neck, and now they leapt out from behind the sofa as he passed it, and from the far corners of the living room as he jogged at an infuriatingly slow pace past it. He struggled past the kitchen as they leapt out of the refrigerator and the pantry. He turned the corner and took off down the hallway, somehow still outrunning the creatures, if only barely. He opened the door to his brother's room, but they were waiting for him as soon as he opened it. This was a terror he had never known as he tried the bathroom in a last ditch effort to fend them off. They ripped the doors off of the laundry room as he passed it, and they spewed out of the toilet to cut him off. His only escape now was the door he was standing in front of, his own childhood bedroom. He threw the door open in slow motion and practically dove through it.

He was instantly captured by the maelstrom that swirled where the carpet should be. This, too, spun in slow motion, like a clogged drain. The occasional flash of lightning illuminated the furniture that spun with him. It tortured him, swinging him around the room for half an hour or more, inching him closer to the center. Finally, as his terror and panic reached a fever pitch, he was subsumed by the whirlpool and all went black and static.

A moment later, Chris opened his eyes to find himself walking up a small flight of concrete stairs to the front door of a house. It took him a moment to recognize it as the beginning of the sequence of events he had just been thrust through. Much to his horror, he was compelled to open the front door again, to take that first apprehensive step inside.

Chris woke up only after the dream had recursed four or five times. He was panting heavily, and his palms were sweating. It was a dream that he had had often as a child, and it really had not lost any of its power with time, he reflected as he rubbed the fog out of his eyes. He glanced at the clock radio in the distance to his left, and ran his tongue over his teeth for a moment before doing a rather comical looking wide eyed double take and springing out of bed. He was running insanely late. The recording studio was booked for forty minutes from then, and it was nearly a half hour drive from the apartment. He leapt up and out the door, to find the bathroom door closed, and the sounds of water running and a toothbrush scraping coming from under the door. "Fuck, dude, I gotta get in there to get my self together!"

Tony, wearing only a towel and the hexagram necklace that he never removed, opened the door and muttered something to Chris with the toothbrush still in his mouth. When Chris made it abundantly clear that he couldn’t understand, he removed the toothbrush and spit the foam and blood into the sink. "I was wondering if you were gonna get up. Give me two minutes here." And with that, he stuck the toothbrush back in his mouth and eased the door shut with his foot. Chris pounded on the door once with the end of his fist. From inside, Tony barked, "Chill, dude. There won’t be any chicks there, so you don’t need to shower or anything." He gargled and spit, then rinsed the toothbrush under the running water. "Just brush and throw on some deodorant. Tell everyone you’re in a band, it'll be fine." Tony smiled infuriatingly as he stuck a cotton swab into a bottle of cologne and smeared it around in his belly button.

He had to admit that Tony had a point. He wandered into the kitchen, where he found a rumpled looking but more or less alert Roger, who had fallen asleep on their sofa the previous night, buttering two slices of toast. Chris reached into the fridge and unscrewed the cap on orange juice carton. He remembered that he had not yet brushed his teeth, and stopped himself before taking a drink directly from the carton. He pulled one of the hopelessly mismatched glasses from the cabinet, this one apparently from a chain Chicago style pizzeria, and filled it. Being very much a pulp man, he was disappointed to find that he had accidentally grabbed Tony's carton of pulp free concentrated swill. He shrugged and downed it in two gulps, making a bitter face the entire time. There was not a doubt in his mind that he would come down with a massive case of heartburn at the worst possible moment later that day.

The bathroom finally vacant, Chris ran through an abbreviated grooming routine at a speed approaching that of light. He dragged a pair of jeans over his legs, and found a reasonably clean smelling shirt from the pile of sorely neglected laundry next to his closet, no small feat during the oppressive Philadelphia summer months. Luckily, most of their heavy equipment was still at the studio from the previous night, so it was a small matter for them to stuff guitars and bass into Chris' trunk, along with a few other odds and ends, and leave the house still more or less on time.

Chris and Tony had taken care of most of the recording duties for the band thus far. But the more they tinkered, the more they saw their own limitations. They came up with some terribly creative solutions to their problems, and they got some decent recordings out of it to boot, but at the end of the day, they knew they had reached the end of their resources. The drums would never sound full enough, the guitars never reach their full potential, unless they could find an actual studio to use, with the proper equipment. They even batted around the idea of purchasing all the specialized equipment that they needed and setting up their own studio, until they actually sat down, crunched the numbers, and realized how obscenely expensive that would actually be.

So they called around to every reasonably professional recording studio they could find with an area code indicating less than a two hour drive. They picked the brains of every band they had played with and were still on speaking terms with. Several, especially the DIY or die punk types, insulted them for selling out, but they did manage to get a few bits of worthwhile advice. They visited the few places that made their short list to speak with the owners, engineers, producers, or whatever they called themselves, and were on the whole greatly disappointed. One rather impressive looking place was run by a pale teenager with braces and Coke bottle glasses, who clamed his single biggest influence to be Dr. Dre. Others were sycophants or bed wetters, and not a single one of them had actually accomplished nearly what they had claimed.

Only one producer stood out to them, and this because of his outrageously good prices, his rooms upon rooms full of rare, vintage equipment, and his Gary Busey like grip on reality. His professional pseudonym was Jose Chung, and he was a recent graduate of one of those programs they advertise in the back of the monthly local music rags you see outside the main entrance of record stores. He was tall and sinewy, looking not unlike a stick of beef jerky, and had not quite reached middle age just hey, but he had a mischievous, almost childlike quality to him. After he claimed, with a completely straight face and not a trace of insincerity to be found, to be a former Mossad agent, despite not even being Jewish, Tony insisted beyond all reason that they go with him, and based on the samples that they had heard, the rest of the band could not easily disagree.

He had thus far proven proficient at his craft, as well as even more bat shit insane than they had originally hoped. He frequently shot water pistols at the skittish orange tabby cat that he kept in the studio, regardless of how sensitive or irreplaceable the electronics it was sitting on were, and he often sat behind his control console fiddling with knives. Paul once asked how many times he had flung the wrong item at the cat, to which Jose's ominous reply was "None so far, with this one." The prevailing theory was that he was some sort of post traumatic, though they couldn’t rule out psychedelics or a good old fashioned hyperactive imagination. The results were hard to argue with, though, so Chris accepted these eccentricities as necessary evils. Hell, Brian Wilson played piano in a sandbox, and Phil Spector used to threaten his musicians with crossbows. This was nothing, in the grand scheme of things, he rationalized.

"So who has to do what today?" Roger asked, once they were off the dangerously narrow, one way city streets and on the highway. The rhythm tracks were all but done, barring a few tricks that they had up their sleeves.

"Tony and I have to lay down the rhythm guitar on a few more, and the leads on just about everything. And Jose said he had some ideas that he wanted to show us for some keyboards on 'Drown', which I thought was really weird."

"I bet you twenty bucks we see weirder today," Roger remarked.

They merged onto the northbound interstate, and a Lexus coupe with heavily tinted windows politely cut them off, swung across three lanes of traffic without a blinker, and ripped down the next exit at no less than seventy five miles per hour. Chris cursed him and his entire family, then he slid the CD made up of the previous day's work into the stereo in the dashboard, and they critiqued their performances the rest of the way to the studio.

Jose's combination recording studio, office, and living quarters was situated in a converted warehouse of some sort, located in the Mayfair part of town, an incestuously close knit, almost antagonistically working class community in what was referred to as the Great Northeast, ironically by outsiders but with an admirable, chest thumping sincerity by the locals. It was situated at the corner of a main thoroughfare and a not so main one, with small shops stretching one direction and well kept rowhomes yawning in the other. Access to the studio was controlled, appropriately enough, by a closed circuit television system and an intercom. He sometimes enjoyed accusing whoever was ringing the buzzer of being disguised agents from the Central Intelligence Agency, come to kill him, or feed him to the aliens they were trying to breed, or something to that effect.

"Come on, dude. You can see us," Chris complained into the camera. The sun beat down on them aggressively. His shirt had already begun to stick to his back, and he knew that the bat wings would be coming next.

The intercom beeped moodily at them. "Yeah, sure, narc. What's in the guitar case, your bazooka? I'll be sending the dog out to sniff you for explosives before I let you in."

Tony laughed heartily, but in silence. Chris pressed the red button, a hint of mild annoyance in his voice. "All you have up there is your cat, Jose."

"How do you know what I do and don’t have up here, you swine? I've got a vicious, snarling German Shepherd up here. I've been feeding it raw meat and hitting its cage with a broom every so often. The cops didn’t want it because they couldn’t train it to let go of the crotch once it clamped down." They had watched Where The Buffalo Roam with him the week before, and since then, they couldn’t get him to stop talking like Hunter Thompson. Chris' only consolation was that Jose did not share the doctor's affinity for firearms. At least, as far as he knew.

After another minute or two of this circular logic, the door finally buzzed and clicked, and they were able to shove the door open and enter the hallway. They needed to make several trips, so to avoid another unnecessary delay, they cunningly defeated all the high technology of the security system by merely propping the door open with a brick they found nearby. They loaded their guitars, their bags, and their snacks into the vestibule, then locked the car up and hefted it all to the top of the stairs. Jose left the door to his unit open at all times, assuming that anyone that got to that point was either a welcomed friend, or far outmatched him.

The door opened onto a single large room, a kitchen area hugging the corner to their left, a living area with several mismatched couches, a huge flat screen television, and an obnoxiously large fish tank, spread out in front of them. The décor was unusual, to put it mildly. Horror movie posters were lined up on the floor, leaning against one wall. The kitchen was filled with ceramic farm animals. There was a garden statue, some sort of fertility goddess with a birdbath at her hip, in one corner. On a table beside the door sat a poorly made copy of Salvador Dali's lobster telephone. A door to the right opened onto the bathroom, with its claw foot tub and no shower curtain, and a set of double doors next to the entertainment center led to the control room and office. Beyond that lay the vast expanse of the studio itself, a huge room with tremendously expensive acoustical treatments in every corner, and all available wall space lined with amazingly rare amplifiers and instruments. The clavinet against the far wall was supposedly one used by Steely Dan in their heyday, but, like many of its owner's claims, that was dubious information at best. They said brief hellos in the control room, then proceeded into the studio to set their belongings down before returning to set the agenda for the day.

Jose, to his credit, did apologize for leaving them to squirm out on the stoop. "You can never be too careful these days," he explained.

"Of course," Tony agreed. "You never know who could be after you, or for what."

"Well, you usually know for what, if you're doing it right." He smiled a smile that he stole from Tony. Chris rolled his eyes and wished that Tony wouldn't encourage this sort of thing from him.

They planned out their day, and it looked to be a long one. They had nine songs that they were working on, and they set their personal goal of completing instrumental tracks for at least three of them today. It was quite a lofty goal for them; it had taken them seven actual working days to finish the drums and bass for all nine songs. The process was sure to be made even more painstaking by the perfectionist streak that reared its ugly head in both Chris and Tony in these types of situations. Jose was trying to steer then away from that, toward a more natural sounding performance and recording.

They worked out which songs they wanted to get accomplished, broke their huddle, and Tony wandered into the studio to set himself up and figure out what gear he wanted to use. He would need a thick, abrasive rhythm tone with a lot of low end frequencies in it for this particular song, so he tried out a few newer, solid state amps that they could really mess up with distortion, and a few of the enormous cabinets filled with twelve or fifteen inch speakers to really push some air. Any musician would be like a kid in a candy store, but tone obsessed Tony was beside himself, trying out every setting on everything, even small combos that he knew would never sound right for this part. Roger, who had been absolutely fascinated by the fish in the huge tank, went into the living room to stare at them until they actually started tracking a song, and Chris sat back in one of the control room chairs, texting Hannah and Paul, both of whom were at work. At one point, he accidentally sent one of his business related messages to her, and when she wrote back in confusion. For a few minutes, he was visibly nervous that he may have sent one of his dirty texts to Paul accidentally. He assumed that if he had, Paul would have mentioned something, probably come on to him pretty strongly. Isn’t it the rhythm section that's always supposed to have the questionably close relationship, he thought?

Tony had no problem at all with any of his parts. He was like a machine in the recording studio. The most he needed for any one part was four takes, and that was only because Jose had screwed up and didn’t record that perfect third take properly. They all took this in stride, and Tony dutifully repeated his flawless performance.

"God damn, I love this guy," Chris muttered after yet another perfect take that, for whatever reason, Tony wasn't happy with.

Jose turned to him, one eye focused harshly on him, the other rolling off somewhere to the left. "But I love him!" he shouted, then after a short pause, began to laugh uncontrollably, a loud, staccato burst. Chris looked sidelong at Roger, who was looking sidelong at him, and promptly excused himself to run to the convenience store across the street for a drink.

Soon it was Chris' turn in the recording booth. He took far less time to set up. He had a few tones that he preferred, dear old friends that he stuck with through thick and thin. He clamped the headphones over his ears, blocking out every sound other than the playback track he would be playing along to, and closed his eyes, though this was mostly to compete the effect. If there had been a tank of water he could have climbed into and closed the lid on, he would have been floating inside it in a heartbeat.

He had his share of problems, and certainly took longer than Tony did to finish up, but they were able to manage three songs finished except for vocals and any little garnishes they wanted to add at the last second. The others cracked jokes at, or, alternately, offered advice to him between takes, to keep everyone engaged in the process and stop Chris from getting frustrated if he hit a snag. The sun had set by the time he returned to the control room for good. Roger suggested they order food, and Jose insisted on getting Mexican delivered from one specific place a few blocks away. While they were waiting, they flipped a baseball game on the massive TV and settled into the chairs to discuss their vague ideas for the next day and yell at the Phillies bullpen for blowing it for them once again. It was decided that they trying to cram the vocals in on the same day as instrumental tracking was not the best of ideas, so they would try to get the guitars all complete over the rest of this weekend, then let Chris get his thoughts together during the week, and start fresh next Saturday with the vocals.

The food delivery arrived, and Jose barked into the intercom in flawless Spanish for what seemed like an unnecessarily long time before he bounded down the stairs, three at a time. He spoke with the delivery boy in a mixture of Spanish and English, in hushed, conspiratorial tones for nearly five minutes, now lending slightly more credence to the hallucinogen theory of Jose's behavior. He finally returned carrying a large brown paper bag in both his hands. This was opened up semi surgically on the coffee table, and the four of them descended upon their food like a pack of starving wolves that was being pursued dangerously closely by another pack of starving wolves.

As he squeezed a slice of lime into one of the most perfectly prepared carnitas tacos he had ever witnessed, Chris' mind began to wander away from the pounding the Marlins were laying on the Phils. He chewed thoughtfully, thinking over his parts, whether he was going to make that change he was thinking about to the words in the pre chorus of that one song. They were planning to send this record around to whatever small, respectable record labels they could think of, just to see what would happen, if they could pick up some better distribution or, in the longest of shots, make a little money off the CD or something. They needed to get at least enough copies pressed so they could sell them on tour that coming fall. They needed to make sure that in the next few months, there was enough money put into the band's savings account, held jointly by all four members, to get the used van Paul had just bought tuned up and ready, rent the trailer, and have all the other loose ends wrapped up. They had two more shows that needed to be confirmed, and two open days where they had to decide if they wanted to book a show, take a day off, or just find a subway station or park and busk for a few dollars. Chris had hoped to get a new guitar before they left, but that probably wasn't going to happen, since he also wanted to do something really spectacular for Hannah's birthday, which was coming up soon. He could never remember if it was the thirteenth or the fourteenth, which bothered him to no end, and her even more, he was sure. There was that one scumbag from that place they had played last month that still owed them seventy bucks for bringing out the biggest crowd the place had ever seen. People in town were paying attention to them by now, and if Chris couldn’t get what they had earned fair and square, then everyone who would listen, hard drinking musician and paying customer alike, would be sure to avoid the club that screwed its bands. There were questions to be answered…

"Wait, what was that? I'm sorry," Chris said, his reverie broken.

"When do you want to get out of here?" Tony repeated, his feet up on the coffee table, a tiny red chorizo sausage impaled on his fork.

"Doesn’t matter. I got nowhere to be." He focused his eyes lazily on the game once again. All the details would sort themselves out, he thought. He had just done some very good work, and he deserved at least a few moments of a break. Tomorrow was another day, and he could get down to business then. For now, it was about all he could muster to yell at the second baseman for blowing that easy double play.