Can't Find My Way Home E-Book

Jake Wilhelm

• Herausgeber: BookRix
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

CAN’T FIND MY WAY HOME

“Can’t Find My Way Home” is a collection of short stories devoted to how far a person will go when their lives didn’t go the way they wanted them to.

Our title story features Kris and Ray. They should have been rock gods. Their meteoric rise in the electric blues band ‘Adam’s Rockets’ exploded in the stratosphere when bandleader Adam ruined their key performance. After decades of obscurity for everyone, Adam needs help.

Will he get it?

“To Balance the World” gives us Charlie. There are a lot of nice people in the world – Charlie isn’t one of them. He’s served 26 years for killing his wife’s lover. Now he’s out, and along with staying by his side, his wife wants to act like nothing happened. Not so with Charlie. He has it in his mind that he should and will kill his wife. Will they make it home?

Unlike Charlie, the husband in “Our Separate Ways” loves his wife. He loves her with a passion - although it’s been 17 years since she was kidnapped, never to be seen again.

Wait a minute.

He’s just seen her.

Our collection concludes with “Behoove”. Richie has just come into some money thanks to some ancient dirty pictures featuring the state’s Governor in much younger days. Her lawyer wants the pictures and he’s willing to pay big bucks for ‘em. Too bad Richie has neighbors...

Leseprobe

Jake Wilhelm

Can't Find My Way Home

BookRix GmbH & Co. KG81371 Munich

Title

CAN’T FIND MY WAY HOME

and other stories

by

Jake Wilhelm

FRONT MATTER

COPYRIGHT

Title, story collection: Can’t Find My Way Home

Title, story 1: Can’t Find My Way Home

Title, story 2: To Balance the World

Title, story 3: Our Separate Ways

Title, story 4: Behoove

Author: Jake Wilhelm

Cover design: Jake Wilhelm

ALL ITEMS (c) Jake Wilhelm 2017/EP Dowd Enterprises. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in shape or form by any means, electronic, mechanical, copying, recording, or otherwise without prior written permission.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book is dedicated to my father, for his inspiration and support

CAN’T FIND MY WAY HOME

He never should have signed up for Facebook, Kris thought as he paced the floor. He would meet with Ray, no doubt, but if he had stayed off the damn social network he wouldn’t have to meet him, wouldn’t have to even know about Adam.

Wouldn’t have to remember.

Not that he didn’t every day.

“Every day,” he muttered, bitterly, to his reflection in the mirrored door of the living room closet.

He may have never been a rock god, although he should have, but at least he had his hair like he did in the ‘70s. Parted down the middle, flowing down his back; muttonchops blending into his mustache. It was all white now. Had to wait until he retired from his mid-level job at Nabisco with a low-level pension before he could let his hair hang down. Really should cut his hair. It reminded him too much of those better days. When he should have been a rock God.

Ray Watson. He had tracked Kris down just to give him a message. Tagged with a profile picture of an old man, the message told Kris ‘Meet me at the Onyx Ballroom, 1pm Tuesday. I found Adam. He needs help’.

Kris dug out his amp, hooked up the wah-wah pedal, plugged in his Gibson. Had a seat on the couch. He strummed the guitar, lowered the volume on the amp so he didn’t disturb the folks in the other apartments, and ripped into Blind Faith’s ‘Can’t Find My Way Home’. It had been one of the best covers Adam’s Rockets ever played, and it was great groovy fantastic dynamite because of Kris and his lead guitar, ripping into those notes, grabbing them from the air and ramming them down the audience’s throat, some said he played better than Clapton.

Adam’s Rockets. They had started out as kids hooked on Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood. What guy with a guitar didn’t dig those guys back then? Adam’s Rockets. They were kids, but Winwood was 14 when he was with the Spencer Davis Group and Clapton wasn’t much older when he started with the Yardbirds. Who didn’t want to be like those two dudes? The Rockets really only played covers of Clapton and Winwood songs from Blind Faith and Cream, blues that either ran you down like a jet plane or lulled you to peace; Blind Faith was the best because that’s when Winwood was up there with Clapton, that was the shit!

Kris played guitar on his couch, fine, doing fine. Then he made the mistake of slipping into that special song; the song that the band wrote together, their first original song, the song that should have made him famous. The chords slammed through his fingers, this was the type of tune that snatched you out of your chair and threw you against the wall, a squadron of B-52s dropping cluster bombs on your scene; he veered into the solo, the strange tight riffs that would have made him famous. Until Adam fucked it all up.

Kris crammed down extra hard on the wah-wah.

Adam. Needs help.

Doesn’t everyone?

Kris almost thought he remembered the words to the song. Almost. When he lifted open his mouth to sing, the words tumbled back into his mind. A beautiful song but no words because Adam had written them, gorgeously beautiful words but where were they? Where was everything else? What happened to Kris’s life?

The dude downstairs pounded on the ceiling. Kris curled his lip. He had the amp set down too low; it wasn’t breaking no sound barrier. Screw that guy.

“Eat shit!” he screamed and flicked the volume switch all the way up and he hoped the guy came up here and tried to start some shit. That would be great. Groovy.

The notes laid out like honey laced with battery acid, the notes were there but where were the words; the song was called ‘Final Rose’ and it had something to do with an old man who saw the same hooker every Wednesday and every Wednesday he brought her a rose, but this time, he learned the hooker had died of an overdose. Heroin, getcha every time.

Lonely Rose. That was the title. Where were the words? Probably went with the record contract they never got even though they were supposed to. Supposed to.

When the guy from downstairs showed up, Kris was ready, ready because he had started to think about Adam, concentrating all his anger and loss on that stupid son of a bitch that screwed everything up and Kris was ready to start hitting and to be hit.

*

The Onyx Ballroom was the same. Large room, plaster medallions and columns and it still looked like the best place to play if you wanted to be noticed in this city. That summer night in ‘71 had been their first major gig, their first solo gig, and this room was packed. College gig, but not your normal one, not like the ones Adam’s Rockets played along the West Coast in cramped auditoriums reeking of old carpet and weed. This was the big deal. Adam at the mike, guitar at his side. Kris taking care of the lead guitar shit and sometimes the lead vocals. Ray with his bass guitar, laying down his groovin’ slightly funk beat, Steve Lenkiewicz at the drums putting Ginger Baker to shame. Steve. That was the worst story of all. He hadn’t even made it out of the ‘70s. Heroin, getcha every time.

“Goddamn,” whispered Kris, seated at an empty table in the rear of the ballroom. So many years gone by. This evil room…did it laugh as it shredded their lives apart?

Kris was the one unwilling participant in an audience gathered in the Onyx for the WESTERN DISTRICT JUNIOR HIGH BAND COMPETITION. A haphazard band of nerds in blue uniforms was currently bleating and banging their way through ‘Swing low, Sweet Chariot’ just like Kris, Adam, Ray, and Steve did when they were in band together, before they discovered guitars and their voices. Shit, Kris had played the tuba! Goddamn!

An old man was conducting the kids. It took Kris much of the so-called performance to realize that the old man was Ray Walton. Should have written him back and said he wasn’t going to meet him, that he could give fuckall about whether Adam needed help or if he was giving out gold plated turds.

Sharing a table with two old women who were probably actually younger than him, Kris patiently waited through the performance, picking at the three fresh stitches on his forehead, although the ER doctor had told him not to pick at the wound, but goddamn, wasn’t that what you were supposed to do with wounds, pick at them because they hurt and all you want to do is make it feel better, even if just for a few seconds?

There were tables in the Onyx Ballroom because those powers to be had known not too many people would be scoping out the WESTERN DISTRICT JUNIOR HIGH BAND COMPETITION.

When Adam’s Rockets played here in ’71, they were hot because by then Clapton was out of the scene and people needed his beat, they clamored for it while they spun old Blind Faith and Cream albums…

No tables that night. Standing room only that night. There were still people outside when the show sold out. Ray told the manager, ‘If they can’t get in, you throw those damn doors open so they can hear, too.’

Adam was in one of his better moods. His more together moods. He actually knew where they were. He also knew that record execs from Apple and Capital were in the front row, contracts idling in their briefcases.

The dude from Apple had told Kris, “That guitar work of yours is out of sight, baby.” To show he was serious, he removed his amber lens sunglasses and said, “Out of sight! I’m looking forward to working with you.”

They started with some cover material, really hummed into action with ‘White Room’. Then started on their original Adam’s Rockets material. ‘The Lonely Rose’ hit the public’s ears for the first time and a girl in the front row screamed with glee and the rest of the chicks started in, and the guys were hoisting chicks on their shoulders and were dancing and when Kris started in on his solo, it was like everyone had dropped the same acid and they were wrapped up in his groove, their needles stuck in and scraping off every bit of pleasure.

Adam didn’t really care for folks not paying attention to him. He also had something wrong with his mind.

Needles crammed in and grooving full speed ahead, Adam whipped his dick out and started pissing on those dudes with the chicks on their backs and Adam was giving everyone the privilege of hearing one of his special laughs, a sound resembling a donkey getting a blowjob, and when Ray hollered out something like ‘Stop it, man!’, Adam pivoted and piss flew on Ray and his guitar, something shorted out and a fire started in the amp, and wait, there’s more, Ray laid off the slight funky ‘be-dah’ beat he’d been barely tinking in under Kris’s tune as the solo crept towards meeting back up with the rest of the band; he laid off that ‘be-dah’ beat because his amp was on fire and instead of playing, Ray proceeded to use his now silent guitar to beat the holy shit out of Adam.

The curtain crashed down. Came down on a lot of shit that night. And there was no way to get that curtain back up, the Apple exec saying, “Sorry, babe, you guys are pure poison now, bummer rap, but there it is.” Didn’t even wish anyone good luck in the future. Dude just split.

And Clapton came back on the scene a year later and the rest was history, sans Adam’s Rockets.

Mercifully, the middle school band, Ray’s band, stopped playing. They might have been working their way through ‘Amazing Grace’; Kris wasn’t quite sure on that.

People left the ballroom. Apparently there was quite an intermission before the next rack of musicians was cued up and these folks were hip to take advantage of it. Soon, the only people left in the Onyx Ballroom were Kris, a janitor sweeping the floors with a white dust mop, and an old man that could not be Ray. No. Ray was a tall kid, 19 years old; dude wasn’t bent over like that and tiny with age.

“Brother man,” the old man said, holding out his hand.

Kris couldn’t remember the words to Lonely Rose (in fact, come to think of it, that may not have even been the title) but he found himself quite able to slip into the familiar LA hood style complicated handshake Ray always dealt out. After they shook wrists, Ray let go and said, “What did you think of the kids?”

“They were pretty good.”

“Don’t bullshit me. I’ve been at this too many years. Too many spoiled suburban kids that never had to work hard and ain’t interested in starting now. Kids today, you can’t get them to get into discipline and shit. That’s OK, though, everyone gets a participation trophy. Doesn’t that make everything better?”

“We never even got one of those. We got forgotten.”

“Yeah.”

“Why do you think I want to help Adam? Screw that dude, just like he screwed us. And if you brought me up here because he needs help moving and you heard I had a pick up truck, those kids will need a new teacher because you will be too busted up teach the one-two beat.”

Ray sat, sighing exactly like an old man as he did so. “Maybe the kids do need another teacher. Look, Adam’s in real bad shape. He’s – oh, hell. He’s a mess.”

“Good for him.”

“Damn, bitter much?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.” Ray nodded. “I’m so broke ass that I still gotta work. And you know how old I am.”