Kevin P. Keating
Zanzibar
-1-
Brendan Cavanaugh sits on a folding chair in the drummer’s studio apartment and in a tone of well-rehearsed nonchalance explains how he’s been kicked out of the house again, but this time it’s different. His parents, despite their feigned religiosity and regular attendance at the little church of brick and stone, the one in the center of town that faces the gazebo in the park and the old courthouse, have threatened to disinherit him, not that there’s much left to inherit anyway. Like a lot of upper middle class people, his parents enjoy the finer things in life; it’s paying for it all that gives them trouble. His mother’s fashion sense, faux haute couture, and weekend shopping sprees to the boutique shops along Oak Street and Michigan Avenue, not to mention his father’s penchant for single malt scotch, hand-rolled cigars and the occasional peccadillo with an aging divorcee in a lavish hotel suite in the Loop, aren’t exactly indicative of people who possess much in the way of self-discipline and fiscal responsibility. They’re big believers in debt management and the confessional.
Brendan knows all of this because he’s seen the credit card statements piled high on the kitchen counter, a Mount Vesuvius of bills with the whole works about to go up in one great cataclysmic bang, and because the outstanding balances are so insurmountable he feels no guilt when he “borrows” (as he later tries to explain it to them) one of their credit cards and treats himself to the steel-string guitar made from Brazilian rosewood that he’s had his eye on for the better part of a month, buys a dozen shots of Tequila for the band after a gig one night, gets a hefty cash advance to score some quality dope, bright green and fragrant as a meadow at the peek of summer, the kind of shit that makes you forget things for a little while, helps you to daydream, brings out your inner genius; Brendan is, after all, a musician and inspiration has always been hard to come by.
When she discovers his crime, his mother flies into a rage that is almost comical in its theatricality. With her deadly talons she clamps on to his mop of greasy black hair and shakes his head so vigorously that she chips a nail and dislodges from the prongs of her ring the three-carat marquise-cut diamond that is the envy of the parish. Gasping in terror, she slumps to the floor and, running her fingers over the carpet, looks up at her son and shouts, “Well, don’t just stand there! Help me, goddamn you!” The real trouble doesn’t start until his father comes home from a “business” trip. Even now, two days after the big confrontation, Brendan’s face is still a little bruised, his left cheek discolored, his upper lip swollen. Nothing that a couple of ice cubes and some iodine can’t fix.
“My parents are delusional, they’re crazy, they’re like children. Shit, what’s a few hundred bucks to them?” Though Brendan is in torment over the incident and wants to whisper the secrets of his pain, he has to practically shout in order to be heard above the din on the tiny television in the corner of the drummer’s apartment. On the flickering screen a frenzied mob of zombies makes its way through the post-apocalyptic streets of an anonymous city, pausing long enough to feast on the flailing limbs of an unsuspecting child, and each time a zombie sinks its black teeth into the little girl’s head the drummer, never taking his eyes from the TV, clutches his sides and erupts with shrill laughter.
“Now, that is totally cool! Ate the brains like a bowl of pudding! Look!”
Brendan fidgets, scratches his head, pulls on his bangs. Heavy drops of rain pelt the windows, turning the neighborhood into a scene from the movie, the colors muted and gray, the soundtrack hissing and crackling. Rising above the smokestacks of the nearby steel mills long thin lazy trails of orange soot bend and twist in the sky before finally settling over a row of bungalows and brownstones. Century-old elms and maples, their heavy limbs hanging over the street, shed the last of their leaves on parked cars. Despite the dearth of consumers in this forgotten quarter of the city, a few stores remain open for business. Perhaps the zombies will ransack these used record stores and pawnshops and ethnic bakeries gorge themselves on the scrawny limbs of the underfed clerks who have for so long anticipated a stunningly horrific demise and a blessed cessation to all their woes.
The drummer worked at one such shop for several weeks last summer, a Christian bookstore, but was fired for stealing cardboard boxes to furnish his otherwise barren studio apartment. Sadly, the boxes contain nothing of value, only the lingering scent of acid-based paper and mildew and the occasional book louse that crawls with strange curiosity across the flap of a box or along the drummer’s shoulder and into his tangled ponytail. His apartment is all dripping faucets and creaking doors and inexplicable pockets of icy air and, with all of the empty boxes scattered around, looks a little like a warehouse in miniature. On the crumbling plaster walls, the drummer has tacked up a dozen faded show bills with the word Zanzibar printed in bold green letters.
It was Brendan’s idea to name the band Zanzibar, and when people ask how he thought of it, he fails to think of a good reason. “Dunno. Just came to me. Like in a dream.” Vaguely he recalls hearing an ad on the radio while driving home from a gig one night, the narrator’s soothing and earthy baritone, like cinnamon and cloves, beckoning him to come to an island paradise: “Zanzibar, home to Sufi mystics, powerful sultans, wise viziers.”
A man drinking alone at the end of the bar overhears this conversation and says, “I know Zanzibar, baby, I been there. Place is fucked up these days. Islamic fundamentalists run the show. I watched a group of clerics take some poor bastard out to the public square and hack off his cock with a machete. Don’t know what he did to deserve that kind of treatment. Probably tapped one of the cleric’s old ladies. Well, that’s the way of the world these days.” In the darkness it is difficult to tell what the man looks like, his features are disguised by the blue glow of the jukebox, but his voice has a certain richness and depth, like the low chords of an old church organ that has survived a bombing raid and is now in need of careful and untiring restoration; it is the voice of someone who has seen and participated in the nightmarish spectacle of the world, has used his fists on some occasions and fled in naked terror on many others. He gulps down his bourbon, never wincing at its bite, then adds, “Hey, kid, anyone ever tell you that you like Freddie Mercury?” Brendan, who’s never heard of Freddie Mercury, gives the man a blank look and then returns to his Tequila.
Dozens of death metal bands compete for the same five or six hot spots in town, and many club managers insist that Zanzibar, in order to distinguish itself from the competition, needs to come up with some kind of gimmick. “You oughtta wear masks and capes,” one man suggests from behind his desk, “run around the stage with chainsaws dripping with blood. But the band members, regardless of their desperation for cash, have some vaguely defined sense of artistic integrity and are unwilling to turn their music into a grotesque stage act, so they settle for playing corner bars that never charge a cover and draw a working class crowd that heckles them or, worse still, pays them no attention at all, and at the end of the night the bartender, smiling sheepishly, slinks over to the makeshift platform and hands them a few dollars or slips them a joint, maybe some pills, a little acid, that they then divvy up between them. Things are bleak. Compromise can’t be far down the road.
More screams. A zombie devours a dog, then a cat.
The drummer says, “Shit. You still got that credit card?”
“Naw, I told you my parents are tight with a dollar,” explains Brendan. “They’re greedy. They think they need trips to Egypt to see the pyramids and excursions through the Belgian countryside to buy cases of beer from Trappist monasteries. Hell, just give me a little mystic and my guitar and I’m cool, I’m doing alright.”
Brendan reaches for the cigarettes on the box that serves as a coffee table, but the drummer grabs him by the wrist.
“Fuck, dude. When you gonna find us another gig?” The drummer’s fury comes without warning or explanation. Spittle flies from his lips, his face contorts with rage. “We haven’t played a decent joint in months. And you haven’t written any new music in months. You and your goddamn personal problems. Where’s your dedication, man, your fucking dedication?”
Brendan yanks his hand away and decides that even though the rain is coming down hard, this probably isn’t the best time to ask if he can crash at the drummer’s apartment for the night. Outside, the serpentining coppery clouds of coal-fire soot collecting along the windows now tint the world with long streaks of color that look not unlike the blood trails left by those hapless victims dragged off by ravenous zombies into dark lairs where the feasting will surely continue with wild abandon until the film’s final frame.
-2-
Although it may be too strong a word to describe his situation, Brendan has to admit that without a permanent roof over his head, or money in his pockets, or any dependable friends to turn to, “homeless” is the most accurate word, one that gets the point across in the least amount of time, but because he prefers self-righteousness to self-pity he convinces himself that only by living an iterant lifestyle, on the brink of complete and total destitution, can he grab hold of the elusive artistic truth he’s been seeking since he first picked up a guitar five years ago, and so homelessness becomes just one more part of his burdensome quest, another kind of suffering, sublime in its ability to wreak havoc with his self-esteem, but one that potentially offers the reward of adoration from millions of fans who will wait in line for hours to see him play in an arena. After all, everyone loves a good rags-to-riches story, and one day, when he gives his first Rolling Stone interview, he’ll proudly boast of his destitution, how he survived on cans of cold soup and bottles of warm beer. Still, he has his doubts, especially when he sits alone on park benches and notices how people avoid eye contact with him as they stroll by. Always there remains the belief that he’s finally hit rock bottom, but he knows that there are still greater depths of despair and, unless fate intervenes, he may soon reach them.
Depending on the day of the week he sees himself as either a runaway from a particularly cruel Dickensian workhouse or an epic hero, the survivor of some long forgotten war, an exile bound for a glorious but still unknown destiny. In the course of his wanderings Brendan quickly commits to memory a new list of rules that surpass for pure soul-stifling masochism all of those pages and pages of thou shalt nots from the Bible that his parents profess to read but never do, a turn of events that he finds ironic in that he’s spent the better part of his life circumventing rules of any kind or simply defying them altogether to the great consternation of those in positions of authority. But wasn’t it true that the people who put themselves in charge of enforcing the rules were also the ones who most often violated them?
The first rule, and the one that takes precedent above all others, is that he should never stay in the same apartment for more than a day or two. No one wants him around for very long, maybe because there is something viral about homelessness, like a highly contagious and abhorrent pathogen, worse than the medieval plague. Brendan also learns never to eat the food in the cupboards unless he’s been invited to do so first; the same goes for cigarettes and dope. Don’t touch them or you’ll soon find yourself on the streets. And if anything goes missing, anything at all--a comb, a guitar pick, loose change scattered on top of a dresser--suspicion immediately falls on him. Regardless of where he stays, the rules remain the same and he must remind himself of them every day, sometimes every hour. Many are the temptations that he faces. For this reason he avoids being alone in a room for any extended length of time.
For a few days he crashes with the lead singer, then with the keyboardist, then with a middle-aged stagehand who cracks open his first beer of the day at eight in the morning and spends most of the night pummeling his wife who despite her good looks and occasional trips to emergency room refuses to leave her husband, maybe because like Brendan she has nowhere else to go.
During the long, dull afternoons when the people he knows have gone off to their part-time jobs in the factories and shoe stores and fast food restaurants, Brendan wanders the city streets and falls into the routine of spending most of his day at the Stone Town Café, a small coffee house operated by a woman has a tattoo of a butterfly on the back of her neck that she playfully conceals with her shock of red curls, hair so red that there can be little doubt that it has been treated in some way, especially given the fact that she has reached that age when one might expect to find a few silver strands showing up here and there. Sometimes, when business is slow and she’s tired of wiping down tables, she flirts with him, pours a few drops of cognac into his mug from a bottle that she keeps behind the counter. “My survival kit,” she calls it, swinging her hips a little as she walks away from his table in the far corner.
Brendan likes it here, likes the muted hiss of the gas fireplace, the smell of cinnamon buns and espresso, the long rambling conversations with failed writers and poets, reformed alcoholics and teetotaler scribes, men with nothing left to distract them but their unfinished manuscripts and crossword puzzles and their neuroses that flit phantom-like through their decaying minds. Most days he brings along his guitar, strumming random chords, trying to write new material for the band, but because he can’t discover an original melody, a satisfying rhythm, a memorable riff, he sticks to the old stuff or stares off into space. Patience, he believes, is the first prerequisite of the artist. Inspiration can never be forced or summoned through sheer willpower.
As evening approaches he locks himself in the restroom where he fires up a joint, inhales deeply and, using the same black magic marker that he uses to jot down forgettable and poorly arranged chord progressions in his notebook, draws abstract patterns on the toilet stalls, pretends he’s lost in a labyrinth of strange and cyclopean dimensions and is charting his way through unknown terrain.
When he emerges from the restroom the owner is waiting outside the door. She peers inside, sniffs. “Sorry about the fumes,” she says. “I just painted the walls in there. Chartreuse. Sounds fancy. You’d think they’d just call it green. It looks green to me except it’s not. No, not quite. There’s a little yellow in there. Hell, I’m colorblind. The stuff was on sale so I bought it. Don’t know why I bother. How many people notice the color of the walls in the shitter? Of course I’ve had my fair share of characters in this place. They always find something to complain about. Name’s Shirley by the way.”
She extends her hand and Brendan, who is very high right now and can’t follow the gist of her words and doesn’t want her to notice the paranoia welling up in his bloodshot eyes, takes her hand and shakes it vigorously. Although he has never been courageous, especially with women, he dares to steal a quick glance at her face, notices how the tip of her nose--bulbous, pitted, purple with an array of broken blood vessels--makes her appear much older than she really is, elderly instead of middle-aged.
“My name’s Brendan,” he manages to say, tough his mouth is dry.
“You live around here?” she asks.
Brendan, who isn’t exactly eager to get into the details of his family life, shrugs, offers an elusive answer, never tells her about his parents and their contempt for his musical aspirations--liturgical music is what they like best--and how they have secret designs for him to become a priest so when the end finally comes he can absolve them of their countless sins.
“You go to college to study music? No? I been thinking about going to college,” she says, “become an X-ray technician or something. Good steady work. But I guess I’m stuck with this place. My old man set me up. Paid for it in cash.”
“You’re married?”
“Kind of. Never went to the altar or anything. But we been together for years. He’s gone most of the time. A merchant marine. Sails all over the world on those big cargo ships. Been everywhere. That’s how he likes it. He don’t like to be tied down. And I ain’t dumb enough to think that I can change him. Wouldn’t want to anyway. I knew what I was getting into.” They sit down at his table and she tops off their mugs and laughs. “I don’t mean to yap at you all night. I just wanted to say that I’ve been listening to you play and I think you’re pretty good. I can use some live entertainment. I’ll pay you fifty dollars a day. Under the table of course. Wish I could pay you more but that’s all I can afford. Maybe we can talk about a raise if people start coming in to listen to you.”
Brendan is taken aback. Is this the first clear indication of his mediocrity? Is she saying that he lacks the talent and persistence and, more importantly perhaps, the luck that it takes to become a successful musician? Whatever the case may be, he’s down to a few dollars in change, and so the following night he starts on the job and bills himself as Zanzibar. For several weeks, during which time he loses touch with the rest of the band, he plays the jazz standards one might expect to hear in a quaint corner café, tunes in the gypsy style of Django Reinhardt, though his technique is flawed, the rhythms not quite as sharp as those of the old master. He flubs notes, forgets melody lines, but no one seems to notice. Never has he heard even a polite smattering of applause from the regulars, only the wet coughs of winter colds, the rude slurping of cappuccino, the grumbling of the uninspired. When he feels a bit daring he plays a tune of his own invention, slyly works it into the repertoire, but even this fails to get a response. Recognition is an elusive thing and he fails to attract new patrons to the café.
Shirley, always with her thick arms resting on the counter and the bottle of cognac close at hand, winks at him. “Hey, don’t worry about those bums,” she says, gesturing to her customers. “Listen, I wanna show you something. Let me show you something.”
He follows her to the back of the café, past a swinging door, and down a creaking staircase where in order to avoid a twisted highway of rusty pipes he is forced to duck his head. Spiders and silverfish scurry away into dark recesses. Swirling tempests of dust shimmer in long shafts of opalescent light that struggle through the glassblock windows. Shirley flips a switch and a noxious cloud of booze rolls off her tongue. From a rotting support beam colonized by termites a single light bulb swings gently back and forth and casts a yellow glow across dozens of wooden crates stacked one on top of the other.
“The old man always finds random junk in the bazaars and opium dens and brothels of the sea ports and then brings it all back home with him. I keep warning him that I’ll toss it all on street one day, but hell, I ain’t gonna drag all this shit up them steps. Sooner or later he’ll come around for it.”
Brendan is unimpressed. “A lot of boxes.”
“Take a look at that one over there. You wanna talk about history, that place is practically mythological. Least that’s what the old man says. Told me all about it. Got chased once by a machete-wielding cleric in white robes.” She cackles and coughs and pounds on her chest. “I can only imagine what he did to piss the guy off.” She sidles up to Brendan, touches his shoulder, his neck. “You gotta a place to stay? Plenty of room down here if you don’t mind a mess. Got an extra bed in the corner there.”
Brendan kneels down in the dust with something like the reverence of a genuflecting penitent before the sacristy, and though he has never been a big believer in coincidence or in the supernatural he cannot help but take this as an auspicious sign that his life is about to change. He glides his trembling fingers across the splintered wood of the crate in the center of the basement and whispers, like the lyrics of a lilting melody, the improbable name stamped there in big black letters.
“Zanzibar, Zanzibar, Zanzibar.”
-3-
Despite the dank air with its faint odor of chemicals, a smell that reminds him of those high school lab experiments that he used to sleep through, the fleshy pig fetuses pale pink to the point of translucence bobbing around in big glass jars of formaldehyde like things half-remembered from childhood dreams, Brendan finds the gloom and solitude of the basement rather to his liking; it provides comfort from the whirlwind of failure and paralysis that greet him each day at the top of the stairs. In the far corner there is a utility tub with running water where in the afternoons (he rarely gets up before noon) he freshens up and brushes his teeth. Next to the squeaking bed there is an end table with an antique oil lamp and on the floor a pile of magazines yellow with age, and of course there is always the safety of the big wooden crates left behind by the merchant marine, a fortress that shields him from any possible intruders who might slink out of the darkness and do unspeakable things to him.
At night, as his thoughts gather like the heavy drops of moisture that collect and fall from the hissing and groaning copper pipes that hang from the ceiling, thoughts so small and scattered that they quickly evaporate and merge into the mossy cinderblock walls, he waits for Shirley to close up the café and join him under the thin sheets and straddle him with the ferocity of a famished she-wolf eviscerating its prey. “Oh, it has been such a long time,” she rasps, stroking his thin arms and legs like exotic objects of unknown origin.
Things continue this way for some time until one evening, when Shirley fails to make her usual appearance, he ascends the steep staircase only to find that the basement door has been locked. The darkness is total and unyielding, he is not sure if he is dreaming, his mind is adrift in an incalculable waste of ideas, and he can only guess at what is reality and what fantasy. From inside the café he hears voices, a heated exchange. Shirley says that she’s permanently closed, gone out of business once and for all, that no one is allowed in, but the voice demands to see the thing that she keeps caged up in the basement, but this can’t possibly be a rescue mission, his friends and family have no idea of his whereabouts, he hasn’t spoken to them in weeks--or has been months now?--but before Shirley with a long squeal of derisive laughter slams shut the café door Brendan shouts and screams for help, begs and pleads to be released, hammers on the walls with his fists until his knuckles are raw and his eyes are red from weeping. Except for the spiders that feed and grow plump on his fear no one hears him.
Days go by. Strange sounds fill the basement, spectral shadows dance on the walls. Before he wakes each morning Shirley leaves a tray of food for him at the top step, a bar of soap, a new razor, a washcloth. He accepts these gifts with a frown of resignation and returns to the basement where he crouches in corners, grovels among the crates, pretends he is a mouse that has burrowed its way through the crumbing cinderblock walls but cannot retrace its steps to escape.
Out of sheer boredom he pries open some of the crates and finds buried beneath the straw peculiar wooden idols with grotesque leers, jars of clay packed with cinnamon and cloves, leather bound volumes written in strange and ancient tongues, waxes and oils and containers filled with mysterious dust like the ashes of forgotten kinds or revered mystics. To his amazement he finds in one crate a canopic jar of alabaster depicting an Egyptian god--Aten? Horus? Ra?--stuffed with fragrant hashish the color of desert sand at sunset and in another crate a great glass hookah pipe with a half dozen hoses that reach out to embrace him and caress his cheek. With the flame from the gas lamp he lights the bowl and takes in the curative smoke that coils in thick plumes around his head. The stuff makes him feel disembodied, divorced from reality, in a vague state of turmoil, and it dawns on him how utterly hopeless his situation has become, how naïve his old fantasies of fame and fortune.
Still, he strums his guitar while sitting on the edge of the bed and to his surprise hears strange new melodies that defy simple categorization, music that comes to him in feverish waves of inspiration, and he has only to scribble down three or four bars on a scrap of paper before another tune presents itself to him. For many months he occupies himself in this way, smoking and composing late into the night, and before he can really understand how it has happened or why he is startled to find that a once empty crate stamped with the word Zanzibar has been filled to overflowing with a stack of musical compositions scrawled in his severely slanted hand.
Soon his dreams and hallucinations and frenetic compositions all blend together like the dissonant harmonies of the twelve-tone musical scale, there is no middle C, no starting point from which to center his consciousness, and he hums a keyless motif and fantasizes about his own demise, that infantile daydream, sees himself writhing in pain as though from some unnamed affliction, one that utterly baffles the doctors who with perfect impassivity listen to the final beats of his heart and watch his body go limp; the simple, plaintive motif then turns into the strangled cries of his grieving parents as they line up before the open casket at the funeral parlor to view his corpse, his lips wired together, eyelids glued shut, features dulled by the artless application of makeup, fingernails manicured and positioned in an unconvincing imitation of repose, neck adorned with one of his father’s gaudy silk ties. “What a misguided boy,” they say, “what a profound disappointment.” During the funeral service, the band plays the motif and transforms it into an insidious danse macabre, but the performance lacks passion or conviction. For them this is just one more gig, another means to procure some dope. The gravediggers wait outside the door, shovels at the ready, whistling the tuneless dirge.
Once more Brendan partakes of the hookah and scribbles a bass line when suddenly through the wraithlike quarter notes of purple smoke that seep slowly from his lips he sees movement, hears the basement door creaking open, feels the dull thud of heavy boots on the stairs, senses looming in the dark a sinister presence that inches ever closer. He jumps up from the dirty floor where he has been composing and peers into the flickering lamplight. At the foot of the stairs a stranger regards him with a bright flash of recognition. “You!” says the man whose shaved head and pronounced cheekbones and stumps of black teeth remind Brendan of those B movie zombies that shake and slobber with a rage that is inhuman and pitiless. The stranger draws near, jabs a finger at him, demands to know just who the fuck he is, what the fuck he thinks he’s doing down here, demands to know where the fuck his old lady has gone off to, “Where, you skinny little prick? You’ve been sticking it to her every night, huh? I’ll fucking tear your throat out with my bare hands, and, oh, hey, wait a minute, what’s this, just what the fuck is all this crap?”
Though Brendan is fully aware that there will be terrible consequences, that ultimately he, too, will be just another amusing curio relegated to one of the crates forevermore, mummified and leathery like a thing dredged up from a haunted bog, still he demands that the man please not touch his compositions, that under no circumstances are they to be tampered with, to return them just as he has found them, to restack them neatly and in the correct order. But with a scowl of contempt the stranger lifts his muscular hands, which are calloused to the point of disfigurement and tattooed with geometric shapes exquisite in their detail, and just before he wraps them around Brendan’s neck and presses his fingers deep into the soft flesh he leans forward and in a voice that rumbles and vibrates like a dust-spewing pipe organ he whispers an ages old tale about what they do to adulterers on the faraway island of Zanzibar.