LITMIR.BIZ

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Up on stage #2, Phil Hart was twisting his way through a musical interlude in “Like a Virgin.” On stage #1, Artie was lecturing Stan about proper Wishbone attire, frowning and jabbing his finger in the direction of the offending work boots. Stan kept nodding like a kid, mouthing the words, “Okay, okay,” over and over again.

      “I give up,” said Dave. “Is it Slade?”

      “Close,” groaned Ian. He winced as though pained on Dave's behalf. “Mick Box was in Uriah Heep.”

      “Damn. I used to love Uriah Heep.”

      “Easy Livin',” agreed Ian. “One of the great tunes of all time.”

      “Mick Box,” laughed Dave. “What the fuck kind of name is that?”

      In the middle of the lounge, the gazers were still enraptured with one another while Hilda stood by, pencil in hand, looking bored. At a nearby table, Alan Zelack touched wineglasses with a ridiculously beautiful woman in a slinky black dress who appeared to have materialized out of nowhere. With the sixth sense of a complete asshole, Zelack turned slowly, grinning with triumphant smugness, and raised his glass in greeting. Dave pretended not to notice.

      “What the fuck kind of name is Uriah Heep?” Ian wondered.

      That was when it happened. Dave looked up just in time to watch Phil Hart stop singing in the middle of the final chorus. A look of mild surprise passed across his face—recognition, Dave would later decide—as he turned slightly to the left. He wobbled— there was no other word for it—and the microphone slipped through his fingers, bouncing off the stage with a percussive cough of static.

      Joey stopped drumming and looked around in alarm. Phil remained upright for a moment, empty-handed and wonder stricken, before sinking, almost gently, to his knees. Walter kept pounding his electric piano, oblivious to everything but the final measures of the song. Phil's eyes got big. He flung his arms wide like Al Jolson, as if to embrace his fate, and then pitched suddenly forward, landing facedown on the stage in a position he never would have chosen if he'd been offered even the slightest amount of choice in the matter.

      Two hours later, drained and without flowers, Dave pulled up in front of Julie's house. He sat in the car for a few minutes listening to the engine tick, trying to work up the energy to open the door.

      For the first time in his life, he had actually watched someone die—a man he liked and admired—and for the moment, at least, everything else seemed insubstantial, not fully serious. The thought of facing Julie's parents no longer disturbed him. Instead he felt a strange tenderness, as though he were preparing to visit them in the hospital.

      It hadn't taken Phil Hart a long time to die, but an eternity seemed to have passed between the moment of his collapse and the arrival of medical assistance. At first the whole room seemed paralyzed, as though everyone were simply waiting for Phil to leap up and finish the song. Finally, Mel, the arthritic sax player, bent down with visible difficulty and retrieved the fallen microphone.

      “Phil's hurt,” he announced, in a voice too calm for the circumstances. “Would someone be kind enough to call an ambulance?”

      The Sundown burst into a hectic flurry of motion, with people scattering in several different directions at once, shouting for a telephone. Dave and Ian rushed across the lounge to check on Phil.

      “Is there a doctor in the house?” Mel inquired. “How about a nurse?”

      By the time Dave reached the edge of stage #2, Joey had already emerged from behind his drum kit, rolled Phil onto his back, and begun loosening the buttons of his ruffled shirt. Phil submitted patiently to these ministrations, his awestruck face turned to the ceiling. Even then, from a distance of about ten feet, Dave could see that he was gone.

      “Grampa,” Joey implored him. “Grampa, please.”

      “Is there a doctor in the house?” Mel repeated. “Does anyone know CPR?”

      Dave hunched his shoulders and took a step back from the stage, trying to look as inconspicuous as possible. He had taken a CPR class in high school, but all he remembered was that Ralph Vergiliak had pretended to hump the dummy, earning himself a week's detention.

      “Grampa.” Joey's voice was stern now, as though he were scolding the dead man for his lack of cooperation. He grabbed hold of Phil's shoulders and gave them a hard shake. “Come on now, Grampa.”

      From the corner of his eye, Dave caught a brilliant flash of red. Before he understood what he was looking at, Alan Zelack had rushed across the stage, shoved Joey out of the way, and begun CPR. The whole sequence came back to Dave as he watched—the head tilt, the sweep of the mouth with one finger, the pinching off of the nostrils. The multiple chest compressions for every breath of air.

      Zelack performed these actions with ostentatious competence, his blond hair flying, his red tuxedo shooting off tiny urgent flares. Dave's first, ungenerous impulse was to resent him for hogging the spotlight even in a tragedy, but that quickly passed, replaced by a grudging sense of respect. Like everyone else gathered around the stage, Zelack must have known that Phil was already dead. And yet he kept trying fiercely to bring him back, pumping his chest and filling his lungs, minute after interminable minute, until the ambulance finally arrived, and Phil's body became the property of professionals.

      The Wishbones played their set anyway. They thought about canceling, but a couple had traveled all the way from Belvidere with their wedding consultant to check them out, and didn't want to have make the trek again. As a courtesy to them, Artie decided that the show must go on.

      Dave felt a little weird about it, but as soon as he strummed the first chord of “Jailhouse Rock,” his reservations vanished. The music jolted him like an electric shock. It seemed to pass through his body on its way from the guitar to the amp, cleansing him, reminding him of how good it felt to be alive.

      And it wasn't just Dave, either. Buzzy, who usually stood stone-faced and motionless while he played, was grinning with amazement, rocking from side to side as he plucked out the pulse of the song. Ian had abandoned his usual two-bit Elvis impersonation and was singing like he meant it, while Stan pounded the drums as though exorcising the demons from his life. Even Artie caught the wave. The solo jumped out of his horn, every note of it a fresh squawk of pleasure. It seemed to Dave that the song had never existed before, that they'd invented it on the spot.

      Somehow they kept the momentum for ten more tunes, finding something real in even the tiredest old standards. When they had run the gamut of their repertoire, from disco to pop, from polka to R&B, Ian surprised them all by breaking into one last song on his piano, something the Wishbones had never done before.

      “This is for Phil,” he said. “Rest in peace, brother.”

      The chords were simple, and Dave recognized them right away. He hadn't played “Knockin’ on Heaven's Door” since high school, back when he was lead guitarist in a band called Exit 36. Listening to the words now, colored as they were by death, Dave wondered what they could have meant to a bunch of teenagers in a suburban garage in 1979, kids whose idea of heaven was half an ounce of Colombian Gold and a girl with big tits to smoke it with.

      But then he stopped wondering and gave himself up to the song. He closed his eyes and sang the chorus with every ounce of strength in his body. It was a blessing. Rest in peace, brother.

      Julie answered the door in gray sweatpants and a baggy orange T-shirt. In her hand was a fat paperback with a tortilla chip marking the page.

      “You lucked out,” she whispered, jerking her thumb in the direction of upstairs. “They went to bed.”

      As he had on countless nights before this one, Dave followed her down the carpeted stairs to the rec room. As always, Julie left the door open, a somewhat discredited token of good faith to her parents. He pulled off his tuxedo jacket and draped it over the armrest of the brown-and-beige-plaid couch.

      “Sorry I'm late. Things got messed up at the showcase.”

      She shrugged. “It's probably better this way.

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