Madeline arranged the meeting with Juli. She talked with her at school away from Teena, and from the way she tells it, Juli wasn’t upset at all about Madeline quitting the Teddy Bears. Juli said she’d been getting frustrated and bored with the band after four years of going nowhere, and more or less acted like she was angry for Teena’s benefit, old friends and all. Juli was bored playing the same songs by Green Day, Black Flag, The Ramones and The Stooges over and over. We actually were liberating her! Funny how that works with bands.
When she came over to the house, her platinum hair in pigtails on side, but otherwise she wasn’t punky, had on a jeans and black t-shirt saying in white “I Just Came Here to Bang,” with a silhouette of someone playing a drum kit. Kai, Madeline and I were there in the kitchen, but Mom was out back tending to her tomatoes, so we skipped the lemonade ritual and went right downstairs.
Juli was all over the Ludwig drums, immediately.
“This is Ringo’s kit, right!?”
“Yep,” I said. “Cost us a fortune to buy it from him.”
“Funny. I used to think Ringo was just your average drummer, but I came to love him. He’s great, he swings. His rolls are all original. He said he never plays them exactly the same. My first favorite was Mitch Mitchell, the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Then after, I was into jazz drummers, like Elvin Jones, then…”
“Elvin Jones! Really?” Kai said. “So you know real jazz…”
“Oh sure. My dad loved Buddy Rich. I used to too, but I think he’s kind of a show-off now. My dad was a drummer, not professional though. He played in some jazz quartets. But then I got into like, Dave Groul, Sheila E, a woman who rocks, you know? Janet Weiss, in Sleater-Kinney. Ditto. Terry Lynn Carrington. She does it all. I am not worthy. My favorite though’s this jazz fusion drummer from the 70’s named Tony Williams…”
“I love this girl!” Kai said.
“Ok, let’s get one thing straight. I ain’t a girl. I’m a woman, you know? Actually, I’m kind of fluid on the whole gender thing…”
“Now I love you even more,” Kai said. “Sister. My apologies,” and he went over and hugged her. They looked pretty funny together, since she came up, almost, to Kai’s chin. Juli was all smiles after that.
“Can I play these a little?” she asked me.
I handed her a pair of sticks, she plunked down on the stool, thudded the bass drum a couple of times, smashed the cymbals then went into a free form jazz cymbal-snare drum attack where she was switching between various time signatures, tricky ones, 5/4 , 7/8ths. If you didn’t know music, it sounded like cacophony, but Kai was bobbing his head along and totally sold on Juli by now. Then she started the drum intro to Led Zepplin’s “Good Times, Bad Times.”
“Keep going,” Madeline said. She grabbed Dad’s Telecaster and plugged it into an amp, and they played the whole song, Juli singing it, hitting all the highest notes, killing it. Juli stood up at the end with her fists in the air holding the drumsticks. Kai and I were clapping like madmen.
“Way way better than The Teddy Bears!” I said.
“Amen,” Juli grinned. “I like it already.”
“So you think you’re interested?”
“Definitely. Time for a change. When you come to a fork in the road, I say take it.”
Madeline burst out laughing. Juli looked at her like she didn’t have any idea why.
“But, you know,” she said, “tell me more what the band’s all about.”
“We can do that. First, let’s sit down.”
Madeline, Kai and I pulled chairs into a circle and sat. Juli took the empty chair.
And now there were four.
I handed her a white morphic bracelet.
Through the tunnel and we were all in the White Room now, Juli still holding hands with Madeline. She let go and put her arms up, pumping into the air, two finger Satan horns pointing on each fist.
“Yeaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh!” she yelled. We three were all a little surprised that she didn’t have the usual WTF reaction. “I dreamed this!” she shouted. “I dreamed, it, man!”
She threw her arms out and hugged Madeline.
“Thank you thankyouthankyou!” then let go and ran forward, disappearing, reappearing behind us. “This is sooo freaking cool! In my dreams I play and make colors and things. I can do that here, right?”
I nodded. This took me totally off guard. It seemed to mean Juli was even more connected to the Orpheus Guild than I was, she’d had visions of it, which I never did. It was like she was discovering a song, same process, only she’d discovered the rehearsal room in her dreams, peaked behind the curtain to see it. One thing was, it meant it was totally right, no question about her being in the band. It got me wondering if she might be the real leader, even if I was the one enlisted to put it together. I’d have to ask Mom about these things when I got back.
“Let’s jam!” Juli shouted.
“Imagine the drums you played,” I said. “Any color, though. Just close your eyes and picture it.”
The drums slowly started appearing, they were exactly the same as the set in my room, but on the drum head facing out there was a psychedelic background with the name “Loud Sue,” on it. It was a pun on the name of the Daoist sage, Lao Tzu. It sounded basically the same.
Kai had his blue sax and Madeline her paisley Telecaster guitar, and I imagined an electric Fender bass that looked like it came from the same time as my Dad’s guitar on the wall. It had a white body and red pick-guard. Madeline started playing the beginning chords of Hendrix’ “Third Stone from the Sun.” I jumped in on bass and Juli was already there, playing the jazz-rock drumming style Mitch Mitchell of the Hendrix Experience played on the original. Colors started to fill the room, then a globe, the earth, floating in space formed in the middle, surrounded by a black cosmos full of stars, the sun in the distance, the earth blue and green and brown, with floating clouds. Kai stood holding his sax, waiting until Madeline started playing the main melody, then played it in unison with her. The earth spun around a few times, like it was a puppy telling us it was happy. We jammed for what had to have been twenty minutes, it seemed like a forever time and like it went by instantaneously. We faded out in cacophony and feedback, and quieted to silence, the ending perfectly ending.
“Holy shit,” Madeline said.
“Hey, can we bring other people here? We could charge, like a thousand bucks a pop!”
“Ah, that can’t happen,” I told Juli.
Ok, we’ve got the band, the best band we could ever put together, I thought. Now’s the time to explain what it’s actually all about.