Whale Music Read Online Free PDF Page A

ballad, this needs words! I bolt into the control room, create about a baseball stadium’s worth of echo, and then it’s into the vocal booth. I put on the headphones and begin to sing.
“Claire, the way the sunlight bounces in you hair …”
    At one point I decide to take a refreshing dip in the pool. It i night, the sky is spotted with starlight. I look up for a long time searching for Claire’s home.
    I wonder if the world of Toronto evolved in a sensible way It’s inconceivable that all planets are like this place. Sometime my confusion is such that my tummy will twist like a pretze my brain will grow fur and burrow into the dirt. I must accept some responsibility—I overindulged on the pharmaceutical front, I drank deeply of the rotgut of life—but I really don think it’s all my fault. The randomness of our world mind-boggling. In my case the boggle is audible, I walk aroun with a ringing in my ears, a warning bell, a siren,
mayda mayday
.
    This love business, for example, is prickly as a porcupin Even Babboo Nass Fazoo backed away from that subject. He bandied the word about quite a bit, plucking a flower, wafting it beneath the shrivelled mushroom he used for a nose, proudexclaiming in that squeaky little voice of his, “Now, I am luffink diz floor, but is de floor luffink me?” I’ve come to my own conclusions. My mother didn’t fall in love with my father, she fell in love with his P. T. Barnumisms. My father fell in love with a mannequin. My brother Danny fell in love with hundreds of women, all of whom took some piece of his heart away when they left. I fell in love with Fay, who went through life like a bowling ball.
    Bowling was the one thing, as a youngster, that I could do better than my brother Daniel. If you could have seen the ten-year-old Desmond, you would understand. I was a born bowler. I was shaped like an avocado, which gave me the requisite centre of gravity. My arms were segmented with baby fat, giving me some strength and shock absorption for the joints. The feet, flat and wide, lent me stability and balance. And, most important, there was the dullness of the activity. How perfect.
    Danny was good, though, powerful and keen-eyed. His delivery was flamboyant where mine was workmanlike. Dan-Dan threw the balls with a huge left-handed hook that often threatened to topple them into the gutters. But they would always at the last moment break away from that edge, catch that one-pin and send it reeling backwards.
    Dan-Dan shot more strikes than I did, but he lacked finesse. I picked up more spares. And Dan-Dan went for the seven-ten splits.
    Do you bowl? Do you know what I’m talking about? The deadly seven-ten split, where the corner pins are left standing on each side of the lane. Most people do what I did, take out one or the other with a slow, easy mow. Danny would attempt to catch the ten just to its right, to send it flying across the wood and into the seven.
    It was next to impossible. He never made it.
    God, I loved my brother Danny.

The father decided that Danny and I needed music lessons, and we started out on the accordion—or, as Danny called it, the titty-tickler. The father thought the accordion was a wonderful instrument, redolent of schnooze, and I have to admit it’s got a lot going for it. It’s not particularly hip (except if you wander away outside with the thing, playing a sort of jazz that would bewilder Ornette Coleman) and the number of accordion groupies worldwide is probably only about seven, and an ugly, dwarfish assortment they are. Still, it teaches one a lot about music, the accordion does, what with the right hand learning how to work a keyboard, the left hand busy as a beaver on those mystery buttons. Actually, you know, the buttons produce chords, so right there you have lead and rhythm, and the accordion is a handy thing to write songs on. Also, on
A World of Heaven
(two and half mill worldwide, they listened to that one in Paso de los Toros) there is an