remember the day I met him, because Wolfjaw looked the same, right down to the midnight-blue Connie with the opera windows parked in front. Only I had changed. He met me at the door on that day in the fall of 1992, shook my hand, and showed me into his office. There he plopped into a high-backed chair behind a desk that looked big enough to land a Piper Cub on. I was nervous following him in; when I saw all those famous faces looking down from the walls, what little saliva remaining in my mouth dried up entirely.
He looked me up and down—a visitor wearing a dirty AC/DC tee and even dirtier jeans—and said, “Charlie Jacobs called me. I’ve owed the Rev a large favor for quite a few years now. It’s larger than I could ever repay, but he tells me you square it.”
I stood there in front of the desk, tongue-tied. I knew how to audition for a band, but this was something different.
“He said you used to be a doper.”
“Yes,” I said. No point denying it.
“He said it was Big H.”
“Yes.”
“But now you’re clean?”
“Yes.”
I thought he’d ask me for how long, but he didn’t. “Sit down, for God’s sake. You want a Coke? A beer? Lemonade? Iced tea, maybe?”
I sat, but couldn’t seem to relax against the back of my seat. “Iced tea sounds good.”
He used the intercom on his desk. “Georgia? Two iced teas, honey.” Then, to me: “This is a working ranch, Jamie, but the livestock I care about are the animals who show up with instruments.”
I tried a smile, but it made me feel moronic and I gave up on it.
He seemed not to notice. “Rock bands, country bands, solo artists. They’re our bread and butter, but we also do commercial jingles for the Denver radio stations and twenty or thirty recorded books each year. Michael Douglas recorded a Faulkner novel at Wolfjaw, and Georgia ’bout peed her pants. He’s got that easygoing public persona, but whoo, what a perfectionist in the studio.”
I couldn’t think of a reply to this, so kept silent and rooted for the iced tea. My mouth was as dry as a desert.
He leaned forward. “Do you know what every working ranch needs more than anything else?”
I shook my head, but before he could elucidate further, a pretty young black woman came in with two tall, ice-choked glasses of iced tea on a silver tray. There was a sprig of mint in each. I squeezed two lemon slices into my tea, but left the sugar bowl alone. During my heroin years I had been a bear for sugar, but since that day with the headphones in the auto body shop, any sweetness seemed cloying to me. I had bought a Hershey bar in the dining car shortly after leaving Tulsa, and found I couldn’t eat it. Just smelling it made me feel like gagging.
“Thank you, Georgia,” Yates said.
“Very welcome. Don’t forget visiting hours. They start at two and Les will be expecting you.”
“I’ll remember.” She went out, closing the door softly behind her, and he turned back to me. “What every working ranch needs is a foreman. The one who takes care of the ranching and farming side here at Wolfjaw is Rupert Hall. He’s fine and well, but my music foreman is recuperating in Boulder Community Hospital. Les Calloway. Don’t suppose the name means anything to you.”
I shook my head.
“What about the Excellent Board Brothers?”
That rang a bell. “Instrumental group, weren’t they? Surf sound, kind of like Dick Dale and His Del-Tones?”
“Yeah, that was them. Kind of weird, seeing as how they all hailed from Colorado, which is about as far from both oceans as you can get. Had one top forty hit—‘Aloona Ana Kaya.’ Which is very bad Hawaiian for ‘Let’s have sex.’”
“Sure, I remember that.” Of course I did; my sister played it about a billion times. “It’s the one with the girl laughing all the way through it.”
Yates grinned. “That laugh was their ticket to one-hit-wonderdom, and I’m the daddy-o who put it on the record. No more than an afterthought, really. This was when my father ran the place. And the girl who’s laughing her ass off also works here. Hillary Katz, although these days she calls herself Pagan Starshine. She’s sober now, but on that day she was so stoned on nitrous she couldn’t stop laughing. I recorded her right there in the booth—she had no idea. It made that record, and they