The Roundhouse: A Crime of Passion, Part VIII

I pedaled hard all the way back to Division Street. I hurried into our building and carried Stan up two flights of stairs to the apartment. I made him drink as much of a bowl of water as he could hold down, then put him on his bed with a blanket and one of my old t-shirts. I went to the bathroom to look for Epsom salts and, by the time I returned, he was fast asleep.

Our apartment was tiny, an efficiency built in the early 20th century to house students from a nearby seminary. The hardwoods in the 14X14 main room were stained and warped, the plaster on the walls cracked and falling off in places. The room had a large window on one exterior wall and a decrepit set of French doors overlooking Division Street on the other. I had managed to fit a desk, a bookshelf, a piano, a sitting chair and a bed into it without making it feel too cramped. During the day, it had a light and airy quality. At night, a strategically placed array of thrift store lamps turned the potential claustrophobia into coziness.

There was small kitchen off the main room, its best feature a large bay window into which I had built a seat. This was where Stan spent most of his time in the apartment, perched on the soft red cushions, smoking his cigarillos out the window, watching the world pass by on the street below. The bathroom was located down a small hall off the kitchen that I had converted into a walk-through closet.

I opened the French doors and let some soft night air into the apartment. From my vantage point, Midtown looked even less appealing than it did on street level, a mess of incongruous rooftops and power lines skewing angles and spreading cancer. Bordered by Music Row, Vanderbilt University, the Charlotte Avenue housing projects and I-40, the neighborhood had managed to become a bathtub drain of sorts, sucking in the worst qualities of each, respectively: middle-aged career angst, budding alcoholism, drug-related crime and traffic overflow. Despite its exceptionally centralized location, Midtown felt more like negative space than a neighborhood.

I checked on Stan again, locked up and walked over to JJ’s Market. I grabbed the last tub of soft Australian licorice from the shelf and ordered an iced coffee from the girl behind the counter. While the espresso machine began belching steam, I picked up a copy of the Nashville Scene, an ‘alternative weekly’ hold-over from the 90’s that had long ago ceased being an real alternative to anything except, perhaps, a deli menu. From the cover, a mildly homoerotic photo of two familiar faces, foreheads touching, fake sweat rolling down noses and chins, was tucked behind a giant headline that read “I Can’t Go For That: One on One Redefine the Meaning of Music in Nashville.”

“Large iced coffee!” the girl behind the counter shouted.

“Thanks.” I dropped a dollar in the tip jar and walked outside. I sat down at a wrought iron table, lit a cigarette and began reading about my new clients.

For the past sixty years, country music, Nashville’s most famous export, has remained unchallenged by any other genre of music currently written and performed in the city. Although many acts from the city's surprisingly robust rock, indie, pop and jazz scenes have signed to major and independent labels, none of them have ever come close to touching the big ‘C’ in terms of commercial success. For years, there has seemed to be no end in sight to the legendary ‘Nashville Curse’ for non-country acts. But, thanks to a new onslaught of so-called ‘tribute bands’ in the Music City, that may be about to change.
“I think that country music is tribute music,” claims Jonathan Trebing, lead singer of Nashville’s hottest tribute band, One on One. “Those dudes are, like, paying tribute to a tradition, a lifestyle. The only difference between them and us is they sign about, like, the good old days, and we sing about shit in the 80’s. I don’t know about you, but my life was way better in the 80’s.”

From a few different points in the distance I heard the bursts of sirens coming to life. Within moments, two fire trucks came barreling down Broadway, the din of their horns bouncing off the buildings like banshees in a canyon. They disappeared in the direction of downtown, soon followed by an ambulance from Vanderbilt hospital. A trace of chemical cut the air, probably from the excited truck exhaust. Once the hub-bub died down, I turned my attention back to the paper.

One on One rose from the ashes of singing/songwriting duo Fenton and Arbuckle, once a fixture on the Demonbreun Street bar scene. Comprised of Trebing and writing partner Peter Bradley Adams, the duo started off starry-eyed and optimistic but eventually grew frustrated at audience’s seeming indifference to their original compositions.

“We tried everything,” admits Adams. “Melody, melody with lyrics, spoken word, chanting, melody with lyrics in Portugese, drums, no drums, matching outfits, soprano sax player... Nothing really clicked until that night.”

"That night" was a bar mitzvah gig in Belle Meade at which the 12 year-old guest of honor had requested Hall and Oates’ “Family Man” for the traditional dance with his mother. The duo, whom had at first been hesitant to learn the song, were stunned by the crowd’s reaction. “Dude. It was magical,” says Trebing. “People of all ages responded. The dance floor came to life. And I’m looking around and I’m like, dude, it’s just me and Pete up here with a drunk djembe player. What the fuck?”

“It was the song, dude,” answers Adams. “We knew then and there that there was no way we were ever going to write anything as good as ‘Family Man,’ so why spend the rest of our lives trying? All we ever wanted was to connect with an audience, and that night we realized that the quickest way to get that connection was through the songs of Daryl Hall and John Fuckin’ Oates. End of story.”

Another fire truck came blaring by. Although I could see my building from where I sat I knew that, in his beleaguered condition, the sirens were probably making Stan a little anxious. I folded the paper under my arm and walked back to the building.
In the vestibule, I realized I that I had forgotten to lock up the bike and trailer. Turning the lock combination numbers into place, I noticed the chemical smell again, stronger this time.
I unlocked the apartment door and immediately noticed that Stan was not on his bed. I checked the kitchen, the bathroom. He was gone. Going back into the main room a second time, I saw that the top sheet and bed spread had been stripped from my bed. I walked to the French doors and looked up and down Division Street before noticing the missing linens knotted into a rope that hung down to the front porch of the building. Even in the best of health, Stan couldn’t tie a knot.
I walked back into the kitchen and looked under the window seat cushions, as if Stan could possibly be hiding there. When I stood up again, I saw the Post-It note on the table. In perfect architectural script, tiny as liner notes on a CD, it read:

I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING. IF YOU WANT YOUR DOG BACK, STOP IT. STARTING TOMORROW, YOU WORK FOR ME. IF YOU WANT TO SEE THE DOG AGAIN, GO TO THE MUSIC CITY CENTRAL STATION AT 7:45 AM. TAKE THE #21 BUS TO THE EAST SIDE AND GET OFF AT THE CORNER OF CHAPEL AND BENJAMIN STREET. WAIT THERE. FOLLOW THESE INSTRUCTIONS PRECISELY AND I WON’T HURT THE DOG.

RIGHT NOW, GO TO THE TRAFFIC ROUNDABOUT.

I was halfway up the hill on Division before I even realized how hard I was pedaling. A policeman was diverting traffic onto 18th Ave., so I turned there and cut through an alleyway to reach the roundabout. The fire trucks lined its circumference, their hoses all pointed at the top of the multi-headed Musica sculpture. The water seemed to have little effect on the fire, occasionally blotting out a patch of it that would immediately reignite as soon as the stream was redirected. The fire had consumed the shrubbery around the sculpture but seemed safely corralled by the pavement around it. An impressive crowd of onlookers had gathered to witness the carnage. I pushed my bike away from the crowd, got a number from my notebook and dialed it on my cell phone.

"Hello?"

"It's David Mead."

"Oh, good. How's it going?"

"Deaderick," I sighed, the full weight of recent events coming to bear on me, "what the fuck have you gotten me into?"