While browsing at Borderlands, my neighborhood science-fiction bookstore yesterday, I found a copy of the new ish of the fiction magazine “The Black Gate,” which includes my story “Beat Me Daddy (Eight to the Bar).” You can read an excerpt on The Black Gate site, or you can order the ish from the publishers for $10 (it’s a giant, fat magazine, about one-third the size of a Sears Catalog). Other fiction in the ish comes from Tina Jens, David Coe, and others.
We were the Eight-Bar Band: there was me and my bugle; and Timson, whose piano had no top and got rained on from time to time; and Steve, the front-man and singer. And then there was blissed-out, autistic Hambone, our “percussionist” who whacked things together, more-or-less on the beat. Sometimes, it seemed like he was playing another song, but then he’d come back to the rhythm and bam, you’d realize that he’d been subtly keeping time all along, in the mess of clangs and crashes he’d been generating.
I think he may be a genius.
Why the Eight-Bar Band? Thank the military. Against all odds, they managed to build automated bombers that still fly, roaring overhead every minute or so, bomb-bay doors open, dry firing on our little band of survivors. The War had been over for ten years, but still, they flew.
So. The Eight-Bar Band. Everything had a rest every eight bars, punctuated by the white-noise roar of the most expensive rhythm section ever imagined by the military-industrial complex.
We were playing through “Basin Street Blues,” arranged for bugle, half-piano, tin cans, vocals, and bombers. Steve, the front-man, was always after me to sing backup on this, crooning a call-and-response. I blew a bugle because I didn’t like singing. Bugle’s almost like singing, anyway, and I did the backup vocals through it, so when Steve sang, “Come along wi-ith me,” I blew, “Wah wah wah wah-wah wah,” which sounded dynamite. Steve hated it. Like most front-men, he had an ego that could swallow the battered planet, and didn’t want any lip from the troops. That was us. The troops. Wah-wah.
The audience swayed in time with the music, high atop the pile of rubble we played on in the welcome cool of sunset, when the work-day was through. They leaned against long poles, which made me think of gondoliers, except that our audience used their poles to pry apart the rubble that the bombers had created, looking for canned goods.