Fat Lot of Good

We’re a half hour’s drive from the middle of the day, on the way to seek our fame and fortunes in the musical tar pits of LA. We haven’t eaten in two-hundred miles and it’s over one-hundred degrees. The trailer sign in front of the cinderblock roadhouse hugging the old desert highway amidst the sand and scrub advertises DEEP FRIED GIZZARD. Once we’re inside, the bartender tells us it’s the house band, not a menu option. 

She has tattoos on her cheeks, ink-dark hair flat-topped on her head. Kitchen specials are misspelled across a regiment of white paper plates taped to the mirror behind her. But she says it’s too early for lunch from their two burner hot plate, so we’ll have to wait for our portions of “Meet Laff and Benz.” For those who can’t wait, a sampling from the big glass jars of no-name spicy meat sticks will have to do.

Around us, scattered men drink alone, staring out of their faces. The only one who looks up to check us out is a desert rat who sits at the far end. What he sees is two pairs. Me and my big brother Justin, and Harry and his little brother, Good. 

The place has all the trappings—the gee-gaws, old license plates, kachina dolls, signs and ball caps with stoopid sayings. In lieu of running water, ice cubes from the bar get piled up to be spray-shrunk in the men’s room urinal. We commence drinking enough to start a relay race, taking turns to melt the tattooed lady’s dwindling supply.

My brother Justin is the next one returning post-whizz. He comes around through the back room, cuts across the raised bandstand by the guitars, keyboards and drum kit, and as he passes the high-hat, gives a cymbal a rap with the back of his hand. Justin’s not even the drummer of our band. I am. Not very talented maybe, but I always liked whacking the shit out of things. 

Justin is a big guy, generally not to be trifled with, but after he settles back on his seat, big ass cheeks flopping over his stool like basset hound ears, the desert rat shouts at him.

“Shouldn’t been doing that, Tiny!”

“Why don’t you come here and tell me that, old-timer?”

The rat vacates his stool, his snow-foamed beer. He perambulates our way, a bit bow-legged, a tad pigeon-toed. 

I get the so-called funny feeling. He doesn’t look tough as much as a little dark-sidey. I hope he’s not going to offer us a top spot in the musical world in exchange for our next-worldly souls. Then again….

Up close, he is gray throughout the buzz cut and age spots dot his high forehead like chocolate drops. His skin looks like you can peel it off in big leathery strips.

He takes the measure of the four of us. He shakes his head, and it floats a dose of no-doubt toxic desert dust at us.

“Why up close I see you-all are just another buncha posers… settin’ out on a hopeless pursuit that’ll be hamstrung with harsh rejection and lost illusions!”

Then he ambles off to do his part to liquefy the lingering urinal ice with his poisonous piss.

“What a naysayin old coot,” says Good, draining his beer bottle dry, washing down another chomp of meat stick. He’s been taking them from the big glass jar in front of him like it’s his personal feedbag. “He’s got no respect toward the righteousness of our quest!” 

This is the way Good talks, because Good takes this band shit seriously. We’re all headed to LA, but he’s the one who has the chance to make it, the one with talent. The rest of us, especially me and Justin, are playing make-believe.

Good and I have always been pals, just like our respective older bros, and we’ve all been linked from the get-go. Cul-de-sac neighbors in a Houston outskirt, we played backyard sports and caused mischief together, until Good showed a proclivity for song in local garages, bringing along the rest of us. So now we’re on our questing way. Although I’m mostly along for my first sights of Cali-forni-ay rather than any serious band shit, as are Justin and Harry, I suspect.

It’s around this time that someone else, a multiple of someones to be precise, a quartet, like us, of someones, emerges from what had seemed the empty back room. 

Regardless of the lack of defined logistics, it’s clear we’re in the presence of Deep Fried Gizzard. Or should I say DEEP FRIED GIZZARD?

They have their band shit down better than us. They rock the ripped black trousers, black leather jackets, black boots with big buckles. They’re skin-festooned with an assortment of brushed nickel, hammered tin and stained steel.

We don’t wear socks with our sneakers, but there our rebellion stalls. Comparatively speaking, we’re more along the lines of a lesser Yacht Rock. Call us Skiff. Because that’s our name, at least the latest one we’ve been going by.

The desert rat is back from draining his vein. 

“Warned ya, Tiny,” he says. He ambles off and sits down to his perpetually full glass. He lowers his head and kisses the cloud of foam. 

“Who’s the one fucked with Stumpy’s kit?”

This comes from the antic skinny Gizzard, that is to say the antic-est, skinniest one amongst them. Presumably their leader, their Good. Let’s call him Bad. 

“Your drummer’s name is Stumpy?” Justin asks, sounding vaguely curious but really gathering up to yam someone in the face, as I know from close quarters little brother experience.

“That would be my nom de drum,” one of the other Gizzards offers up.

He’s the one with the porcupine quill hairdo. As I’m now clear on who my counterpart is, I try to stand a bit taller on tip-toes and think rhythmic thoughts. He doesn’t seem to be missing any appendages or digits so I’m stumped, which I guess must be the point.

Harry, the one among us who has the most imposing coif—not that it’s much more than permanent bed-head—usually lets his electric keyboard with the stuck keys do what talking he can muster; Harry is essentially a tone-deaf noodler always undercutting his brother Good’s hi-dee-ho.

But now, he waves his spicy meat stick in the air and shouts, “Battle of the bands!

The desert rat at the end of the bar snorts into his beer. One of the other dull drinkers blinks one eye and then two, like a reptile prodded by a shod foot. The bartender spits out the mangled cocktail straw she’s been chewing.

The Gizzards exchange glances, begin to bobble their heads. 

“What are we playing for?” one of them muses, looking bemused.

All this presents me with a skiff-full of performative nerves. The last thing I thought when we eased off the road was that we’d be our slapping our collective glove across the visages of something called Deep Fried Gizzard. I want that double-ring hot plate hotted. I just want some damn lunch—not bargain bin meat stick. Shit, even Justin won’t eat them.

“Hey, is that thing on yet?” I call out to the bartender. “Got a hankering for that meet laff, hold the benz!”

But the skiff has sailed and everyone ignores me.

“I’ll tell you what,” says Bad the Gizzard, “why don’t you humps go over there and show us what you’ve got.”

“Shouldn’t we be using our own instruments?” I ask my big bro, catching up to him as we all start into the back room. “You know, we’re giving them home field advantage and all that.”

Justin ignores me, other than to shove me at the drum kit, the array of bass, snare and tom-tom, hi-hat, crash and ride. I don’t offer much beyond nomenclature, whatever that is. I’m the weak link in this ensemble, who join me in perusing the instruments.

I try to get Good’s attention to see if I can talk him out of it.

“Hey why waste notes on these dopes,” I say.

But Good ignores me, gets into his pre-set routine. He puts the remnant of the latest spicy meat stick he’s been eating into his pants pocket, walks over and taps the mike. By the third time it emits a thump, and he takes it from its stand. He lifts his head back like he’s looking for meaning in the brown water stains on the once-white ceiling tiles, but I know he’s locking in.

Harry is applying his limp noodle to the keyboard set-up, the unfamiliar double-deck of it, his hands flopping up and down and back and forth, putting forth pipsqueak sounds. He’s got what’s left of a meat stick hanging out of his mouth, like an unlit cigarette.

My brother has picked an ebony number from the trio of guitars. He straps it on and plugs it in and strums until the speaker he’s attached to starts barking. 

He looks at me, still not behind the drums. He raises an eyebrow and shoots a sharp chord at me.

“Hey out there…” Good says into the crackling mike. “We’re Skiff!”

“Boo!” harmonize the Gizzards, who are aligned in the doorway separating the bar from the back room.

Then the black-garbed quartet moves aside and a motley parade of the drinkers from the front meander in. Unsurprisingly they are led by the desert rat. Each one of this dirty half dozen are fisting highballs, lowballs and beers, some two-handing them. They come and scatter into the chairs at the round tables facing the bandstand. 

I finally sit down on the throne. Stumpy’s got a big plastic sleeve to the side, filled with sticks and mallets. There’s a big golden gong even, hung up on some sort of wooden contraption. I see a blurred version of myself in there.

We have our usual set, a ride-with-the-dust-sail-with-the-wind medley. Seeing no way out of it, with Justin still giving me the stink-eye, I start my non-spicy meat stick-click to count off—when Good suddenly bursts instead into an a cappella version of our one original song: 

I’ll show you a fat lot of Good baby

It’ll smile your face with mirth maybe

You won’t believe the times we’ll have

My love will cover you like a salve

Trying to catch up to him, I start hammering away. Justin and Harry jump in, with guitar and keyboards.

As the song goes on it gets a reaction. The rummies stand from the scattering of tables and come closer to the stage and begin to twitch and tap their feet. They flop together in some sort of half-assed mosh pit. More like a moosh. I look over to where the Gizzards were standing but they’re gone. All that’s left is the tatted-up bartender, slamming two spicy meat sticks together, like a stroke-keeper on a slave ship. 

We’ve played some pretty lame gigs, but this one is the strangest, and that’s even before what starts happening with Harry. His hair is sticking straight up more than usual—as if whatever pillow he’d gotten his latest styling from had been electrified.

Same with Good. His hair is changing and so is his clothing. His newly black jeans are ripped, the back of his black tee shirt torn. Even as far away as I am, when he turns in profile I see a glint of stained steel in his lower lip.

The bartender is still over there slapping meat stick—off to the left, off to the right, again over her head.

“Spicy meat stick!” bellows Good. “Spicy spicy meat stick!

“Spahceemeetic!” choruses the Moosh. “Meetic!”

Neither Justin nor I are changing. We kept those sticks in the glass jars where they belong. I stop banging the drums, get off the stool, and head to the front of the stage.

“This place is fucked!” I yell at my bandmates, but only my brother seems to be listening. He throws the guitar off him like it’s red-hot.

Harry is finger-flailing the keyboards, and Good is doing some sort of high-stepping rain dance. Both of them have meat stick dangling from their mouths.

Justin gets off the stage. I’m torn between following him and trying to get Good back from wherever he’s gone.

But blood is thicker than meat stick, in what passes for my book. 

“Posers!” the desert rat dubs us again as I push through the grove of old boozers like they’re so much dry, stanky grass.

I catch up with Justin and we go from the back room, past the bar. The bartender tries to slap us with her sticks, but we duck away and head out the door.

In the late-day sun the distant mountain peaks glow a soft pink. A more ominous blue-gray color has settled into the sky with the arrival of dusk. 

As we run past the trailer sign in the dirt lot, there’s been a change.

FAT LOT OF GOOD it reads now. 

I glance up. A buzzard circles on the breezes, wings held stiff, prowling for what it likes to kill. It makes me think I should go back to save Good from whatever it is, but then Justin shouts, “Come on!”

I guess I’m not such a good friend.

I get into the van, grabbing the now unloaded shotgun seat, missing its usual resident Harry. I won’t miss him either. Good, yeah, him. Memories of Wiffle ball curves, tree limb sword fights, firecrackered frogs, and backyard tent-overs flash forward. Then they’re replaced by a vision of the future when I’m in a jostling crowd, below instead of with him onstage. Up above, Good struts and searches for his wail, while I’m no longer a part of his rocking skiff.

The newly-minted Tiny floors it.

We’ve gone maybe a hundred yards in the direction of LA when my brother lets out a grunt, whips the wheel around and we go into a power drift. As we commence to spin I’m sent aloft.

Grinding up desert dirt, we regain the road and speed now the opposite way. Bright light fills our fleeing mirrors as we head back to where we came from, to where we belong, the last sliver of sun slapping hot sense into the back of our wayward heads.