NEWSLETTER

"The thing about the $5,000, you see, is that when your uncle died we expected something, some kind of minor stir, to happen in Japan. That loner folky stuff is so big over there now.”

“UAI should have sent him some money,” Baron said. “Just a little money once in a while. Tim was very degraded at the end of his life.”

“Well, whatever their relationship, we’d hoped to take advantage of new movements and put this guitar on the casino wall in Tokyo.”

Deke folded his hands and leaned back. “Tokyo, you know, is preferable to Rotterdam.”

Baron held the check. “I can’t do this.”

“You’re here.”

“For this, I mean.” He held up the check.

“What did you fly here? Southwest?”

Deke stood and went to his desk. He pulled out a small booklet of pink paper, scribbled something. He reached into his desk and pulled out an envelope.\

Baron watched as he counted out $240 in 20s.

The man looked up from his counting. “Round trip from Iowa City, right?”

He came over and handed Baron the money. On top was glossy coupon for a free meal at the casino restaurant.

Baron held the money and the check and the coupon. “How do I get out of here?”

“I’ll walk you out.”

Baron stood.

Deke held out his hand. “It was nice doing business with you.”

Baron nodded, just enough to disagree. But he’d taken the money, and he shook the man’s hand.

They came back out through the waiting room. He glanced sideways to the girl, but she did not look up.

At the elevator, the man pressed in a code.

“One thing,” Baron said. “How did you know so quickly it was the actual guitar?”

“The photo on the back of the record,” he said. “I have Tim’s record.”

Baron looked at him.

“I’m actually a fan. I grew up in the late 70s. It’s a very nice record. It has, you know, a real gray-day emotion.”

“An emotion otherwise hard for you to locate?”

“Don’t assume monetary toughness precludes other, more complicated feelings.”

“Greed does.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way.”

“I’m sorry you didn’t like the record enough to keep your word.”

“It’s the company word, and that always has to be able to change. The word was one thing a week ago, now it’s another. You got your money. You decided to do this.”

The elevator arrived.

Baron stepped in without another word or a look back. The doors closed as he turned around. Baron could see the elongated smudge of his reflection in the elevator’s steel. His hand felt the absence of the weight of the guitar. Tim’s had written his spooked-out songs on the guitar, and now the guitar was gone and the feeling from the sale was sharp, real shame.

The elevator sank effortlessly. An old song played through the speaker above, folksy, with mandolin, and his thoughts went to nothing, as if the reverberations of the melodies carried away all sense of weight and purpose. And for an instant he seemed to understand something about his uncle, about musicians in general, ambivalence settling in with the starry accountability of a passing melody.

But he wasn’t a musician, he had no way of using ambivalence. He was a line cook, and he came from ugly people. Tim was the one good-looking one—his goldenness treated as an embarrassing mishap by the family, as if Tim’s mother had been raped by Ryan O’Neal. And Baron had grown up, like his family, embarrassed by his uncle’s obscure career—almost to the point of permanent disavowal, until one of the skater blond, Zeppelin freak brothers from a nearby modern house in a better neighborhood had asked him, with a kind of restrained amazement, if Tim was really his uncle.

Baron had nodded as if caught, but the kid had invited him over to watch Quadrophenia and Baron had tried pot for the first time and he still remembered the night as a kind of initiation into his wobbly and immense teenage years.

Now he was nearing 40 and gaining only weight. Beth had long pale pin-up legs and was otherwise unattributable to anything in particular. He’d come to Vegas with a single angle of desire, the guitar a prop, but Beth might as well be a rock floating out in space and even the artifact office had seemed like some cold and solitary lunar world. But the elevator, as it sank, felt crowded with body warmth, crowded with the recent presence of dozens of others down below, pulling away.

SAM BRUMBAUGH


Where did the idea for this story come from?

My friend Dave Berman emailed me to tell me that this musician Jackson Frank’s guitar and the acetate of his first record were up for sale on eBay. I was like, “Oh god.”

It is kind of sad.

Obviously some relative of his had inherited it and put it on there to make some money. It was the guitar he wrote all those great songs on and there it was on eBay. That was the germ of the idea for this story.

But what about the girl in the story?

I guess when I look at relationships, I focus on a single thing about a person. Something like how long and white someone’s legs are can sustain me for two months. That can be enough.


BARON IN VEGAS | 1 | 2 | 3 |

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