Handmade Heart

By Chris Strange

It is the early years of a new millennium. The musical group, The Oral Blondes, is unexpectedly reunited after a twenty-year hiatus to renew the promise of an unrealized success. Their journey will lead through a gauntlet of frustrating yet comedic obstacles and a tangled web of deception where trust and faith are rare commodities. Friendships get tested, hopes shattered, and dead ends overcome in this who-done-it that keeps you guessing until the end.
Handmade Heart is the second book in a series that started with the novel The Limits of Respectability.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Back Bridge Publishing
• Release date: Oct 23, 2019
• ISBN: 9780995895010

Book preview

Handmade Heart

HANDMADE HEART

Chris Strange

Dedication

This book is for Audrey, who, without her encouragement, I would have never rediscovered my love for music. Also, Stuart (even though he’ll never read this), for putting a few logs on the fire and the strange collection of supporters who see the creativity and talent when I fail to see it myself.

Copyright © 2019 by Chris Strange

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or other media.

First Printing: 2019

ISBN 978-0-9958950-1-0

Back Bridge Publishing

212 Beech St. E.

Whitby, Ontario, Canada L1N 3B2

Preface

Although it is not essential to have read The Limits of Respectability, it is recommended before delving into Handmade Heart. The two novels reside in the same universe and are interconnected. Reading one before the other gives you a heightened knowledge of the characters and their behaviours—perhaps an emotional bond?

What I’m trying to say is: you can ride a unicycle; however, two wheels beneath you offer more stability and will get you to your destination faster.

And in the end we will achieve in time the thing they call Nirvana and all the stars will shine for me . . . Space Hog

Chapter 1- The Honey Wagon

There he was in a clearing by the road with a brooding wall of trees surrounding him, the man and his mullet. Like an escaped convict who had tunnelled out of the joint, he was clothed in dirty, gray overalls. He was squatting, bent at the knees, his ass jutting out toward me in greeting, and struggling with a red metal valve on the side of his truck.  He grunted and cursed in a way, oh-so-familiar to me. It took me back to a place before the recording of time—well, our time anyway—a time when we’d been young and full of possibilities, waging war against the norm, holding hope to the perilous flames of the fire.

He’d been fairly svelte when I’d known him back then, with just a bit of a paunch for a belly, but to see him now, he’d let himself go, trading in the Greek God for the fat Elvis and exploding in his dungarees with no prejudice to direction, and gravity.

He began to rap on the valve with a wrench he had pulled from a red, metal toolbox—a container currently on its side, vomiting screws, nails, linchpins and a solitary hammer on to the ground beside him.

His truck was a mishmash of knobs, hoses, and metal winches jutting out of the flatbed of a Hino amid twin Honda motors, the bookends for a huge stainless steel tank. A lengthy corrugated tube hung like an elephant’s trunk from the back end of it. It looked like someone’s skewed vision where the future meets the disintegrating, rusted past, where a gentle breeze brought a waft of its sun-baked reek in a concoction of grease, oil and something disturbingly human. There was a bumper sticker holding the left tail light to the whole mess with the assistance of duct tape. It said, "Shit disturber," and I knew right then, it was him. It had to be.

He continued to hammer away, Common ya frickin’ bastard-of-a-thing. Oh—what elks can go wrong?

I shouted, Wally!  Hey man!

He ceased his grunting, his actions, and slowly stood up, turning to face me with a full growth of beard hugged his mouth like a fungal infection. He shielded his eyes from the sun to place me in shadow as I approached.

Sparky . . . is that you?

None other, my old friend.

I advanced on him cautiously, not sure if I should shake his hand. Who knew where it had been? Besides, he was also dishevelled and profusely sweating, giving him a translucent, sticky glow.

Well, I’ll be. John Sparky Malveen—haven’t seen you for—

It’s been years, Wally. Let’s leave it there.

He extended his hand, and I took it, dispelling my earlier thoughts of the man and his occupation like he was a leper or, an accused pedophile. Unexpectedly I found myself struck with a need, and I wanted to tell him everything—my whole reason for being there right down to the last detail, but I couldn’t—not yet anyway. I had been through much already to get this far, but that would come out in time. Right now, I needed to suppress the sordid details. I needed to accept the moment in its simplicity. I needed him to be, Wally.

I hardly recognize you without all your hair, he snickered, making a wheezy laugh. He grinned through his tanned, weathered skin and bush of a beard. I bet you made some barber happy.

I needed a change. Cut it off in a fit of depression if you must know. I still have a lock of it tucked away in a drawer somewhere. Hey, I didn’t exactly recognize you either, I said and thumped Wally’s drum-tight, tummy like a ripe watermelon.

You know me, Sparky. I love to eat, he said, almost bragging.

And I see you still do. I think there are entire countries that eat less, Grizzly Adams. I tapped the side of the tank that had the words, Gristle & Son’s Sanitary Services, stencilled across it and gave him a cockeyed look.  What’s all this? What the hell do you have your nose into now?

Don’t look at me like that. It pays the bills. I’m out here by myself, my own boss, nobody at the office bugs me. I get my route in the morning, and I’m gone. It’s not as bad as it probably looks—

Sucking the crap out of outhouses, could it look any better? So I guess that makes you what, a Fecal Wrangler, or a Vacuum Stool Technician, maybe—?

I prefer Waste Retrieval Engineer.

Just what the world needs, Wally, more engineers, to balance the scales with lawyers and assholes, I guess.

He looked a little indignant. "Hey Sparky, its people like me that keep your Johnny-on-the-spot sanitized and ready for use," he said.

That’s all right Wally; I have indoor plumbing now—

It’s not a glamorous job I’ll admit, but it pays all right and the fishing's good up here—

And you don’t have to go far to get your bait, I’m sure—

"It’s not like I get in there with a shovel, you ass. Goddamn it! It’s all done by the old Honey Wagon here . . . He lovingly stroked the trucks’ main tank. With pumps and hoses we have, nowadays it’s a lot cleaner, a lot neater and a lot more practical."

I see—when everything’s working.

Wally looked at the valve and kicked it. Son-of-a-bitch, mother-scratcher seized up on me. I won’t be gittin’ any more work done today.

Don’t worry, Wally. If someone is in such dire need to use one of your, uh . . . plastic phone booths, I’m sure they’ll still make the call.

I suppose. It’s too hot today anyways. The heat’s kickin’ up the poop bouquet to a notch below unbearable.

I waved my hand in front of my nose. I hardly noticed.

Besides, damn kids got in this one here, he said disdainfully. He jutted his thumb out to a blue plastic cube with a yellow roof that was leaning slightly to the left beyond the tail of the Honey Wagon. "They set the turlet-paper on fire and nearly burned the frickin’ thing down to the ground. It’s all charred black on her insides—poor baby."

Wally reached down with some effort and more inaudible cursing to collect his tools. He picked up a hardhat that had been resting out of sight behind the rear wheel carriage. It was more of a pith helmet than anything else. Wally said it was all part of the uniform.

"Just make sure you don’t pith into the wind," I told him. A poor joke at best, I know, but my weak attempt at humour was lost on him anyway.

I said inquisitively, So what happened to the electrical trade? That’s what you were doing when you left the band, weren’t you? The struggle between ohms and amperage too much for you?

Wally informed me he’d quit being an electrician to start his own business when the '90s were coming to a close. "If you’re not working for yourself, you’re working for someone elks," was the way he put it.

He’d started a little thing called Millennium Outfitters. It was a company providing emergency supplies to people in the event of catastrophes. You know, water, non-perishables, camping gear, small weapons that sort of thing, he said. But when Y2K never emerged and the world continued to spin with ceaseless regularity, Wally was left with a garage full of gas generators and sling-bows, as his business went south and folded. It sounded a lot like one of my birdbrain ideas, starting with the best intentions until it crashed in a fireball of ruin.

After survivalist fiasco, he’d looked for the easy ticket, driving around in old cars, (Beaters, he called them), getting into accidents on purpose and trying to sue someone for restitution. He’d even worn neck braces in court. But the money he’d picked up in the insurance settlements had been lost in the aftermath of three brutal divorces.

Are you sure you’re not up here in the wilderness hiding out from angry ex-wives? I asked him.

Now here he was, away from any remnants of those days, driving the Honey Wagon and wiping his ass on the alimony checks every two weeks before firing them off in the mail.

So you see . . . I just got tired of it all, Wally said. I traded in the Electrical Cherry Picker for the old Vac-mobile here and moved out to God’s green pasture.

Hell’s half-acre is more like it, Wally. There’s nothing around here. What do you do for excitement—other than fish, that is?

Well, there’s not much to tell, Sparky. It’s a simple life; I don’t need a lot, and there’s no stress—But what about you, still working at that place—?

No, I moved on.

What? You were at that fruit market, like forever.

Yeah, and do you want to hear something strange, Wally? I worked there for years. I could have whatever produce I wanted and never felt the urge to eat a damn thing. Now that it’s gone—I miss the taste of a Bosc pear, which is so screwed.

"Why don’t you just buy a boss pear somewhere elks?"

Bosc! Bosc! The brown ones! I said as if telling him the colour would magically change his pronunciation. Do you understand what I’m saying, Wally? I hate Bosc pears; I loathe them—the gritty texture. It’s like eating sweet sand. Besides, at my age, it was time to get away from doing menial tasks and dealing with someone else’s shit.

Wally looked at the tank on the truck full of human waste.

Sorry, I said. No offence. Right now I would say I’m doing a little of this, a little of that. I wrote a couple of books.

"Really . . . you . . . an author? Anything I’ve read?"

You read now, Wally—?

Very funny.

They’re not published yet.

I thought you said—?

I did. I’m an author—just apparently not a very good one. I felt inspired, so I did it.

So are you here to do some research on Honey Wagons, you know, for your next uh . . . unpublished book? God—the stories I could tell you. There was this old woman with fifty cats, a duck and a turtle and her outhouse was—

Seems intriguing, Wally, but no, I’m here for a different purpose—a mission if-you-like. I’m interested to know what you think about it; in fact, everyone from the old band.

"The Oral Blondes?"

Uh-huh . . . and you’re a hard guy to track down.

You drove for hours up here to see me first? I’m touched.

"No. I said, you’re a hard man to track down, but I’ve already talked to everyone else, Doc, Skunk, and Grub. I needed to know what you think about it. Perhaps, even allow you to come out of the wild and back to civilization if you like."

So, if I’m so hard to find, how did you know where to look, Sparky—?

You mean besides Gristle & Son’s telling me you’d be here? A chance meeting with someone we both used to know. Come on, let’s get something to eat, and I’ll tell you all about it.

Wally rubbed his stomach with newfound admiration. Now, you’re talkin’ my language, Sparky.

Chapter 2- One song

It was one of the last things Wires said to me the day I’d met him and chatted about the old days and our long journey together. One song, he had said. It had been somewhere between a puff and a blink of his eyelids as he pulled on a freshly lit cigarette.

I had been there at his invitation to enjoy the opulence of his lifestyle and the man’s company. He had travelled a different road than the rest of the old band and been successful at it too, the lucky bugger. I had inhaled the moment and held my breath, hoping it wouldn’t end while I listened intently, digesting every word. After all, I had nowhere else I had to be.

I was inspired by what he had to say, but not in the way he envisioned. Wires urged me to return to the music business. Give it another shot. Know for sure. Conclusive, perhaps the word he used. I don’t remember precisely. But instead, I had written. I had gone home and banged away on the computer keyboard until my fingers hurt, and my mind was empty—building my manuscript in a creative house, brick by brick, word by word. It had been a collection of short stories and novellas mostly. What can I say? I was caught up in the moment—his moment, and the grand pedestal elevating a long-time friend to one of God-like stature. I wanted (needed) to take a swing at a home run ball.

I’d thought what I was writing was absolute brilliance, simple genius, like adding cream to coffee, except I still drank my java black. I remember reading my maven material the next morning with shock and revulsion. It was like the dream you wake from; it seems so plausible until it crumbles horribly into reality. There would be no need to send out queries to publishers and wait for a long line of rejections to surely come.  However, I had awakened the long-dormant seeds of creativity and felt purpose in their growth. So I kept at it.

All it takes is one song, Sparky.

Perhaps with the music, I’d felt it had run its course, jumped the shark, to borrow a Hollywood term. Or maybe I knew how much work it would entail and procrastinated? I think deep down; I was afraid—the fear of failure. To me, getting rejected as a writer, a vocation I had no idea about, made a lot more sense than being torpedoed over something I put my heart and soul into for so many years like music.

Over the past weeks, I’d been thinking a lot about Wires and his accomplishments. I thought of his discipline to achieve success without pretension and his ability to be down to earth, twenty floors up. Now I wanted to set the record straight as he’d said; know for sure and take a leap of faith.

In his way, Wires had removed a lot of the obstacles for me, taken away the reasons and excuses to not pursue it. If it meant putting my ass out there to fail—so be it. At least I could move on with clear conscience and peace of mind. Even without Wires in my life, he was still fixing things just like he’d done all those years ago when he’d been the sound-man for the band. I could still see him in my mind’s eye, twirling knobs, boosting equalizers and repairing flash-pots. I could see him peering through those mop-like bangs of his, getting us out of the tight spots and log jams impeding forward progression. The man had been forever restoring equipment and our lives to working order.

All it takes is one song . . . and it doesn’t have to be a good one either.

He was right. There were songs I hated, yet hummed mindlessly, like the song for the fresh, feminine feeling and the one for home improvement products. I couldn’t even remember the precise items pitched, but I knew those damn jingles. I guess it goes back to what our manager had said, Be hated or loved nothing in between, his little mantra from his book of little mantras.

With me, however, I would have to be loved, I would settle for nothing less. It would have to be something special, something memorable, a time capsule that would instantly catapult people back to the point in their life when they heard it for the first time; a song like Boys of Summer or, Back in Black—songs forever trapped and churning in the grey matter rapids of the populace brainpan.

Write the damn song already, Sparky!

I could hear Wires almost shouting it in my head now, which was strange, because in all my memories of the man I rarely heard him raise his voice. But who was I kidding? The business had twisted and corrupted, changing further from when I’d found myself mired in the bog of its malodor. It was all product placement, movie soundtrack tie-ins, and hundred dollar concert tickets now. It was a business where the new generation huddled like nuclear scientists in their impenetrable bunkers, developing new sounds with systematic beats and chord progressions.  Revenue streams to render the current obsolete and sell you the same shit over and over and over.

Many times I had been close to making a dent in the webs of success, but like a would-be thief, I’d never made off with the money. I seemed apprehended two steps from freedom in the very spot which I’d tended a garden of a blooming career, and I was now a million miles away in all directions. I had been definitive. I chose to walk away with foresight and perhaps a little malice. Yes—I had chosen.

Now with my time removed and living on the outside, I could see clearly. I could see all the mistakes and blown opportunities. I could wipe the age-caked dust from those rose-coloured glasses—

SPARKY!

Yes, Wires.

Stop wasting your time with all this mumbo-jumbo. Follow your gut and write the fucking song with the rest of the band!

Ok—Ok.

This time Wires had given me a new attitude and caused me to chase down the rainbow. I had to know one way or the other if it was meant to be. Right place, right time—I was going to make it the right place and the right time. I was going to dig the extra two feet to find gold, step over the line of freedom to daylight, glimpse the success ( if ordained), or the black hole of defeat.

Wires was the closest I had been to someone who had achieved celebrity—real celebrity, and I wanted a breath of that air, which I guess would be the air of stale cigarettes, but I digress. I wanted to know definitively, with an unquestionable absolute, this was the way it would be. I was going to do whatever it took. I owed Wires that much, and Doc would be the first one I would try to find.

Chapter 3- A meeting of the mimes

Doc Barlow and I had been through it all together, the dives, the barroom brawls, huddling and shivering together with no money in no man’s land. We’d watched the endless stream of abandoning musicians pole-vaulting their way to greener pastures while we persevered.

Doc and I had been there to the bitter end with the Oral Blondes trying to make a go of it, sticking our fingers in a dyke full of holes and leaking badly. Finally, we had given up the ghost and accepted the end even while our newest members, a guitarist named Serge and a drummer named Tony, argued over our musical direction.

Serge, play dat note.

No, Tony. Do dat beat.

Play dat note!

Do dat beat! Ah forgeta bow-dit, ya fuckin’ guy.

Now I needed a yes or no answer from the man I had not spoken to in years, hoping our past together would somehow yield a future.

He hadn’t been too hard to find. I’d driven up to his house, met the wife and sat next to the hydrangeas in the backyard. I drank the fresh brewed and reminisced with the man much the same way Wires, and I had done, when he’d blown through town on his tight schedule, two years previous.

Doc still appeared much the same, his curly dark locks of hair now peppered with grey, his tall, physical presence and his facetious sense of humour. He had put on some weight, but hadn’t we all? But even with time marching forward, he was still Doc, more visceral than visual, and I took a strange consolation in it.

We sat below the cedar shingles of a covered deck where a hot-tub churned and bubbled underneath its lid like a boiling pot. The aromatic drift of coffee invaded the nostrils and stimulated the senses. How could he say yes? Why would he say yes? I shouldn’t have come here. The doubt was creeping back in. He’s embedded in this world now, the life of Better Homes and Gardens. Talking about the good old days isn’t going to change it.  However, I was about to find although the concrete was poured long ago, it had not yet set.

Sometime after the third cup of java, and an hour and a half of light-hearted conversation, starting mostly with, Remember what Wally did? he took me down to a room in his basement. It had the comfort and placement of a feminine touch. A knitted afghan was draped across the couch with a pattern to match the curtains, and the square cushions turned on their points to diamonds near the armrests. There was a plush carpet demanding your bare feet and rows of shelves with stuffed animals amid delicate things in the union of chaos and order.

The smell of potpourri with a hint of cinnamon emanated from a tiny dish of leaves and pinecone on the coffee table. It was guarded by a small glass unicorn pinning down a quartet of coasters. I found myself fighting off sudden drowsiness, overcoming my rebel instinct to scream.

However, in a small room off to the side was the portal to the past. A place where cables still hung, crossed and connected like bloodlines to a different time. It was a domain where the marriage between the ivory keys and the nickel wound strings still existed. There were solid panels of gently blinking lights in a studio cockpit in need of a pilot, and a microphone, perhaps still with the subtle reek of beer, jutted out from the long arm of a metal stand radiating with the low razor hum of electric life.

Doc, all your equipment—it’s still set up. I’m impressed. I’d have to fight my way through layers of cobwebs to find my stuff.

I like to tickle the ivory from time to time. It’s a nice sanctuary away from all the mucky-muck, mundane routine, he said.

You know, a couple of months ago, I wouldn’t have even thought about picking up an instrument, Doc. But now things have changed. I have the urge to know for sure. The Oral Blondes didn’t end well, and I think it’s up to us to see they do. We worked too hard to get nothing from it. You know it’s true—

Oh-oh, Sparky’s got an itch to throw his money away again, sleep in a crusty old bed, and eat grilled cheese off a hot plate. Do you want me to get that agent on the phone—what’s his name, Murray Sleezyk? He’s probably still booking that shit; although, I’m not sure if he’d be interested in a band of one—spit it out Sparky. Why are you really here?

I’m not talking about touring again—no way. Nothing that extensive, Doc, a little recording, maybe play a few live shows, nothing we can’t do ourselves. It’ll be fun, you, me Skunk, Grub and Wally, the original five Blondes.

"Wally? Je-sus, Sparky! How the hell are you going to track down Wally? Even Wally doesn’t know where