Vinyl Cafe Unplugged - By Stuart McLean Page 0,2

Jim McDevitt saw Dave pull the ball out, he carefully tucked his new ball back into his school bag.

“Nice ball,” he said to Dave.

By the end of summer Dave’s beautiful ball was a mushy, torn, grey lump. But Jim McDevitt’s was in the same pristine condition it had been on the Tuesday after the Easter weekend.

“You should’ve looked after it better,” said Jim one day at recess.

Perhaps if Dave had been a different sort of person he would have remembered Jim McDevitt and the candy-guzzling Cubs before accepting the job of road manager for a heavy-metal group called Thrasher. Thrasher was in the third month of a year-long Tour of the World! when Dave signed on. The fact that the position was open at that point should have told him something. He caught up with Thrasher in a hotel bar after a disastrous show in Evansville, Indiana, during which the sound man had hurled a bottle of Scotch at the lead singer and punched the drummer’s girlfriend—leaving her unconscious in the wings, while he stormed around the arena yanking cables out of speakers in the middle of Thrasher’s set. By noon the next day, on the bus and already halfway to Minneapolis, Dave had begun to appreciate just how irreparably dysfunctional the crazed enterprise was. The bass guitarist wouldn’t get on the tour bus and was driving himself to the gigs. The drummer’s girlfriend, who had been retching in the can since they left Evansville, had already been banned from a rival band’s tour by a road manager because of how badly she had messed up their drummer with the drugs she provided him. The keyboard player hated everyone, especially the bass guitarist; and the lead singer was so strung out it had taken them half an hour to talk him out of the hotel elevator that morning.

It took Dave four months to straighten things out. By the end of the summer Thrasher was more or less back together. Dave, on the other hand, was spinning apart.

His success didn’t go unnoticed. Whenever the tour lurched through New York or L.A., executives from the record company told Dave he was the best road manager they had. They praised his resourcefulness, and his diplomacy, and his ability to smooth out the most cantankerous local promoter. Most of all, they said, the band loved him.

Well, they should have. Dave was doing just about everything for them—picking up their dry cleaning, driving their dates home, preparing home-cooked meals on a two-burner camping stove he had bought in an army surplus store in Flint, Michigan, lending them money and writing “Dear John” letters for them as the bus rocked through the night. He finally quit the tour in Durham, North Carolina, after his fifth visit to see the lead singer’s mother, who was in hospital recovering from surgery. The singer said that the stress of visiting a hospital and spending time with his mother would be too much for him to bear.

Dave lasted eight months with Thrasher. When he left, he vowed that he would never allow himself to be taken advantage of again.

And here he was, a quarter of a century later. Apparently he hadn’t learned a thing about protecting his self-interest. Whenever he took a stand, especially whenever he tried to take a stand with his own family, no one ever paid him any attention. And if that wasn’t enough, he had just learned that the dog ranked himself higher than Dave in the family hierarchy.

The Saturday evening after Arthur had delivered that disturbing news, Morley said, “Who wants to go for ice cream?”

Sam said, “Yes!” And then he said, “Ice cream, Arthur?”

Now ice cream happens to be Arthur’s most favorite thing in the world. When Arthur heard the words “ice cream,” his backside began to twist toward his head, his tail started wagging furiously and he crab-walked across the kitchen to Sam—the picture of a dog in heaven.

Dave said, “Let’s go to the Dutch place.”

Sam said, “Ice cream, Arthur.”

Arthur’s eyes started to roll back in his head.

That’s when Morley said, “Dave, Arthur doesn’t like the Dutch place. They don’t have soft ice cream there.”

There was a pointed silence.

They went to the Dairy Queen. They took a bowl for Arthur’s ice cream. Dave watched the dog snorting it down, ice cream all over his face.

“Don’t you think this is kind of peculiar?” he said to Morley as they watched the dog eat.

She looked at him strangely. She didn’t understand.

Later in the week when