By Jake La Botz
The Devil’s Pump
By Jake La Botz
Like a lot of hungry songwriters in Nashville, I took paying gigs where I could get them. Mostly cover bands: Top 40 for tourist joints. Classic country for honky tonks. 60s rock for one-percenter clubs. I was as good as anyone on the scene, but no one ever asked me to join their band. I was always “the fill-in guy.” I’ll admit I played a little loud and squeezed my own music into sets whenever possible, but hell, everybody did those things. It was hard to get original songs out there. I ought to know.
Twice a week I hoofed it up and down Music Row, dropping off demo CDs and promo sheets. I could almost hear my records hitting the wastebasket on the way out. It got so the only outlet I had for playing my own stuff was busking on Lower Broadway, and you can believe there was no glory in that. Felt like I was a janitor at a member’s only club, hoping they’d ask me to join one day.
One night I picked up a spot with a country band called Hill and Holler at a downtown dive bar. We must’ve played five hours straight. The asshole singer kept yelling, “Play it diff ‘ernt,” like I was supposed to know what that meant. At the end of the night, when they divvied up the tip jar, I only got eighteen bucks. That was the breaking point. After three years in Music City, I was ready to give up for good.
The bass player on the gig, Chad, said he needed a lift home. On the way to his place, I told him how sick I was of Nashville and the low-paying gigs, that I was ready to leave. He said I complained too much. I thought that was funny since he was catching a free ride in my car. Then he started jabbering about church gigs, saying they paid better than bar bands and it didn’t matter if you knew the music or not.
“Same five chords you already hit on that old six string. Only difference is the words—they only sing on one subject. Ha ha,” he said.
Through some kind of gospel grapevine, Chad knew of a weekly spot for a guitarist at New Life Pentecostal out in Duck River.
“Course, I’d take a small finder’s fee for hooking up a money gig like that,” he added.
Like a lot of sidemen in Nashville, Chad was a bottom-feeder, only looking out for numero uno. The more he talked the worse the church thing sounded. At best I figured it meant wearing a suit, sitting through boring sermons, and strumming along to corny confessionals in a sterile, too-bright room. At worst, I imagined bible-waving rednecks trying to convert me to their snake-handling, tongue-talking ways, withholding my pay ’til I got baptized.
Most of what Chad said went in one ear and out the other, until he got to the part about free fried chicken. I perked up then. Considering I was living off rice and beans, and didn’t have enough cash to leave town anyway, I agreed to check it out.
A couple days later, I called Chad’s contact and drove out to New Life. It was only an hour southwest of the city, but my little beat-up Toyota looked immediately out of place soon as I got off the Interstate and started following country roads toward Duck River.
I pulled up in front of what looked to be a repurposed funeral home. The cross stuck on top and the sign out front let me know I was in the right place. Somebody was moaning a hymn inside. There was nothing in me that wanted to go in there, but my hand turned the knob and creaked the door open anyway.
“Welcome,” a voice called from the chapel, “you must be Steven.”
An older man near the pulpit waved me to an empty seat across from his.
“I’m Elder T.W. Peabody,” he said, motioning me to sit down.
His grey hair was pomped in a conservative Elvis kind of way. He wore an old-timey herringbone suit—probably bought twenty years before I was born.
“Tell me ‘bout yourself,” he said as I sat down.
“Well, I’ve never played gospel music before. Or been inside too many churches…”
“I’m gonna stop you there, Steven. Rather than tell me what you haven’t done, how ‘bout telling me what you have done. I hear you write songs, is that correct?”
“Yeah. I mean I haven’t gotten much going with them yet, but…”
“There you go again ‘bout whatcha haven’t done. Why don’t you just play me something.”
The Elder chewed some tiny thing between his front teeth while he waited. I fumbled the latches on the guitar case and placed the instrument on my knee. I thought, if this was an audition it was the weirdest one of my life. There was nothing in my repertoire that matched the occasion. Every song I’d written was about love gone wrong, drinking to excess, or revenge. I picked what I deemed my least offensive number. It was called “Ruffled Feathers.”
“Ruffled Feathers on bumpy skin. A bumpy face bottle of gin. Bumping you was my joy in life. You rolled me like loaded dice. We played ’til the games got rough. I called you mine, you called my bluff. But I squeezed outta that pigeon trap with a ruffled feather in my cap…”
When I finished, to my surprise, Elder Peabody was smiling.
“Good. Very good, Steven. But, as the drunk said to the bartender, ‘Got anything stronger?’”
I watched him make the little chewing motion again, wondering what to do. I started on the heavier stuff then: alcoholic anthems, smutty stories, libelous rants about wrongdoers, murder ballads specific to how I’d accomplish the dirty deeds. After playing an entire set of my darkest tunes, the Elder applauded.
“You’re just the fella I’m looking for.”
He stood and waved for me to follow. At the basement door, he fumbled through a large ring of keys, unlocked a couple deadbolts, and started stepping down.
“This is where we keep the snakes, Steven,” he said, turning to me with an earnest expression.
Before I could think what to do, the Elder let out a belly laugh so hard he had to hold the railing to keep from tumbling downstairs. When he turned on the lights, first thing I noticed was an old-school printing press.
“We write ‘em, draw ‘em and print ‘em ourselves. Have done for fifty years,” the Elder said, handing me a small booklet with a picture of Jesus and Satan locked together in a wrestling hold on its cover.
There were stacks of the things everywhere bearing different designs. One showed a man accepting a bible on his deathbed. Another showed a nuclear fireball burning people alive while a few floated safely toward God in the sky. I’d seen them before. Little five-by-three-inch comic books handed out on street corners and left on buses. Whacko things about salvation, sins, and “the end times.”
“Whatever this is, I’m not interested,” I sneered, backing toward the stairs.
“You got me wrong, son. I’m not trying to turn you. Thing is, your songs have the bump and grind of Satan in them. I could almost see his big red hips just a-switching side to side whilst you belted ‘em out. See now, that’s what these tracts need. The syllables, they have to sing out and grab ya’ like lyrics. Like your lyrics. That right there’s the key. They gotta have that deep maroon in the setup. If they don’t match Satan’s vibrations they cain’t do a thing. You gotta open that dark door inside a man—where the Devil hides—‘fore you can plant the seed of Christ. My bible tells me ‘make a joyful noise unto the Lord.’ Yours is the noise part. The chaos. My part is planting the seed. Helping people follow a new leader…”
“You want me to write religious tracts?” I interrupted.
“You’d be surprised to know who we’ve hired in the past. People with big names in country music…”
“What’s it pay?”
“He he… there’s that maroon again. Three hundred per,” the Elder laughed.
“But I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“Satan’s all around, Steven. All you have to do is look.”
Driving away from New Life, a red warning light flashed on my dash letting me know I was low on fuel. I stopped at an off-brand gas station outside Duck River and pulled three smashed dollars, like aborted origami, out of my pocket. A pasty yokel with a bowl cut smoothed them out with his meaty paw, down-smiling at me like I was the biggest loser he’d seen all day. By the look of him, he was bound to be a New Lifer. I imagined him on Sundays, feverishly flapping his fat hands in the air while the Elder spouted Satan’s-gonna-getcha sermons.
Gas prices must’ve gone up again. The three dollars I pumped into my rust bucket didn’t even shut off the fuel light. I banged on my dashboard and cursed when I saw that. Weirdly enough, an idea for a tract came to me just then. I scribbled it on a napkin so I wouldn’t forget.
On the way to work one day, Johnny stops to fill his tank. But when he sees that gas prices have gone up from the night before, he only adds a couple gallons. At lunch, he goes to buy a sandwich from a truck, but it costs so much he can only afford a bag of chips. When he gets home that night, his landlord tells him he’s raising the rent. On Friday, when payday comes, Johnny decides he’s better off spending his hard-earned wages on a gun so he can rob a bank.
At home, I wrote it out like a song and called it “Rob a Bank to Fill the Tank.” It wasn’t too bad. I came up with an arrangement on guitar too, figuring I might as well make music for my own catalog while working on the Elder’s Christian cartoons.
When I drove back to New Life the next day, I was greeted inside by an old deacon who was cleaning the place. He introduced himself in a mumbly way and pointed me to the basement. I expected to find Elder Peabody down there, but instead, there was a young woman. She sat at a drafting table with her back to me like she hadn’t heard me come in. By the shininess of her red hair and the way her dress hung on her curvy figure, I knew she’d be pretty before she showed her face. After a minute of standing there, and her not acknowledging my presence, I asked where the Elder was.
“You talk to me from now on,” she said flatly, sketching on paper with a colored pencil.
“I wrote a tract.”
She turned around then. Her freckles, full lips, and little blue veins shining through translucent skin gave an otherworldly look. She was beautiful alright, but in an alien or ghost-like way.
“Give it here,” she said, snatching the notebook from my hand.
She sighed and shook her head while reading it.
“Why Elder brings you half-wit musicians around here, I’ll never understand. First off, it’s not a goddamn poem. There are no couplets in a tract. Second, it’s not a children’s story. You don’t call the protagonist ‘Johnny.’ Third, the story has to be believable, something people can identify with…”
Her voice was high and twangy with a slight lisp. It would’ve been charming if she hadn’t been cutting me to shreds.
“Do I get paid or not?” I asked.
She turned back to her drafting table, pulled a fresh page from her sketchpad, and pencil-carved it into three boxes. In the first one, she sketched a grinning devil inflating gas prices with a bicycle pump. In the next, she sketched a dopey-looking man toting a guitar. The ears were bigger than mine and the gapped front teeth more pronounced, but it was clearly a caricature of me. Behind the man, she sketched her same devil creeping up and making a maniacal face. In the last box, she drew me and the devil again, this time with him inserting his pump hose into my backside, causing cartoon-me to fill up with anger. I was embarrassed, but it was amazing to see my story come to life.
“I might be able to fix it,” she said, dialing an old rotary phone on her table.
“Pay him half,” she told someone on the other end.
The old deacon was upstairs waiting with an envelope. I counted out one-fifty in my car, half of what the Elder promised, trying to understand what’d just happened.
Embarrassment turned to anger on my way out of town. I stopped at the same no-name gas station as before, dropped a twenty on the counter, and dagger-stared the cashbox yokel. No down-smiling off his ugly mug that time.
Driving home, I saw a bunch of shiny show print posters stapled to telephone poles. They advertised a tent revival featuring none other than his holy-rollerness, the Elder T.W. Peabody. I imagined him up there, bamboozling superstitious bumpkins, lining his own pockets with bible-greased greenbacks while he wouldn’t even pay me what he promised. But it was the caricature lady and her humiliation tactics that really got to me. As I considered how to settle the score, an idea for a new tract circled in my mind. I wrote it out when I got home, making sure not to rhyme sentences or call the protagonist “Johnny.”
The next day, I bolted out of bed early, ready to confront the rude redhead with my new story. When I got to New Life, the old deacon let me in and showed me to the basement without a word. She was down there sitting at her table like before, ignoring me like before too. I stood there and waited.
“You again?” She asked, without turning around.
“Might like this one,” I said.
“Doubt it,” she sing-songed, spinning her wheely office chair to face me.
When she finished reading it, a slight grin lit in the corner of her mouth. She turned back to the table and sketched wildly. The drawings—caricatures of me and her—were more elaborate than what I’d written. She added Satan into the mix too—small at first but growing larger in each scene—as a spectator, watching her and I in various intimate positions. In the last frame, she drew the Devil masturbating furiously while he watched me take her from behind, bent over the drafting table.
When she looked at me again there was no hint of humor in her face.
“Is that what you want, fucker?” She asked, holding up the pictures.
Though I’m sure the lump in my pants told the story, I nodded anyway.
“You wish,” she said disgustedly, erasing the images of herself from the sketchpad, leaving only me and the Devil.
When I got upstairs, the deacon was standing in the middle of the chapel with a broom in his hand, staring at me. I wondered if he knew what’d just happened.
“What’s her name?” I asked.
“Who, Doreen?” he said, moseying over and handing me an envelope.
In the car, I counted three hundred in the envelope cash, unsure why I’d been paid. More than the money, I was puzzled about Doreen, wondering what made her tick. I replayed the details the whole way home.
It wasn’t just what she drew, but how she drew it that was so strange. Especially the way she sketched herself. Her cartoon face feigned surprise, but there was nothing passive about what caricature-Doreen did in those scenes. The more I thought about it, the more I realized she had made herself the story’s main character. She was the real ‘Johnny.’ Me and the Devil were just following her lead frame to frame.
For the next few days, I funneled my obsession with Doreen and her drawings into a new tract. It was about an attractive woman too proud of her beauty and talents to be kind to others. In the story, she spends her days hunched over a sketchpad drawing fanciful pictures while avoiding the real world. On the rare occasions she looks up from her art, everything and everyone appear to her as ugly little specks littering the landscape. The only one good enough for her is God up in heaven, though she even takes issue with Him at times. When she complains to the Big Man about how awful others are, how nasty the world is, he pats her on the shoulder and says, “I know, Sweetie.” As the story goes on, as her arrogance intensifies, we see that the god she’s been worshipping has sprouted tiny horns from his haloed skull while the shade of his glorious skin shifts from light pink to deep red. I couldn’t wait to see what she’d do with that one.
On a clear bright morning, with my notebook by my side, I drove the long way to Duck River—meandering past farms and country houses, wondering if Doreen lived in any of them. When I got to New Life, I walked purposefully toward the entrance, ready to one-up Doreen at the humiliation game.
The deacon, who was outside trimming hedges, put his sheers down and called to me.
“That it?” He said, pointing to my notebook.
I ignored him and tried the door. It was locked.
“She ain’t here,” he said.
I searched his wrinkly face. Not sure what I saw there. Maybe pity. He pulled an envelope from his overalls and reached for my notebook. I scribbled my phone number on the back before handing it over, telling him to make sure she got it.
On the way home, I convinced myself it was all just part of the game. She was probably in the basement reading my story at that very moment. I was winning. She would see that.
When I pulled up to my building, I heard a phone ringing in the distance. Somehow I knew it was mine. I leapt up the stairs three-at-a-time and jabbed my key into the lock, but I was too late to catch it. The little red light on my answering machine was blinking when I walked in.
“Steven, this Elder Peabody. I’m calling to terminate our partnership. You held up your end of the bargain and I held up mine. Satan’s dark door is open wider than we’ll ever need for my tracts, and it’s dangerously open in you. I pray that you invite the good Lord to set up shop in your heart before it’s too late. But not in my church. I mean it. Don’t come back.”
I paced my apartment a while, motherfucking him and motherfucking her. It was just a crummy church in Duck River, but it felt like I’d been kicked out of another of Nashville’s closed clubs. Doreen was behind it. I knew that much. She had made the Elder call me, just to see if I’d come crawling back. No way I was going to give her the satisfaction.
I wrote a new batch of tunes over the next week. Maybe you’d call them love songs. I’d say they were hate songs. Of course, they were all about Doreen. I took them down to Music Row, hoping to pitch them to publishers, but it was harder than ever to get a meeting. When the big shots wouldn’t give them a listen, I went crosstown to Lower Broadway and set out to busking.
Though I played all morning, the only tips I got were little jingly coins from the bottom of people’s pockets—the lint-covered ones they wanted to get rid of anyway. My guitar case looked like a trash can for tourist’s pocket corners. Then, as I was belting out my darkest Doreen song, something else dropped in the case. The man who tossed it walked away quickly, handing the same little booklet to everyone else on the block. I stopped mid-song and picked it up. It was titled: The Devil’s Pump by Elder T.W. Peabody.
It was my story alright. They even kept the protagonist’s name as “Johnny.” Out-and-out plagiarism is what it was. It’s not that I wanted my own name on it, but the Elder was making money off it somehow, and I knew I’d never see another dime. Then I thought about the two of them—the Elder and Doreen—wondering if he was screwing her, or if she was his daughter, or maybe both. In a fit of fury, I upended the nickels and dimes from my guitar case and stormed off.
I went over to Chad’s house, the bass player who sent me to New Life in the first place. He said he didn’t know about Doreen, or Peabody, or the tracts they made, and that anyway he was about to leave on tour with a top-name act and didn’t have time for me. I said I wanted to get the hell out of Nashville too, asking if he knew of any tours I might get on. As he was closing the door in my face, he stopped and asked,
“Want to sell your guitar?”
I knew Chad was a scumbag, but I didn’t expect him to snake me like that. He must’ve seen how desperate I was. In the end, I took four hundred cash for my vintage J-45 and went home to gather my things.
It didn’t take long to load my little Toyota. I left the furniture, kitchen stuff, and even the stacked-to-the-ceiling boxes of shrink-wrapped demos. It was time to move on from all of it.
Unsure where to go, I headed West on the Interstate, imagining a new life on a California beach. An hour later, when I got near Duck River, I passed a billboard for Bud’s Guns. I’d seen it before, driving to and from the church, but this time there was a poster for Peabody’s tent revival stuck to it. At that moment I noticed something strange. My body felt kind of flat, two-dimensional, like it wasn’t a real body at all. I imagined Doreen hunched over a little drafting table in my head, drawing my hands on the wheel and my foot on the gas, leading me frame by frame through another comic strip. I pulled off at the next exit.
As I stepped out of the car, I felt fuller, stronger. In fact, I felt great. I knew exactly what I wanted before walking into the store. Of course, Bud tried upselling me on foreign models and fancy grips, but I held my ground and bought a simple snub-nosed .38. I was through with assholes and rip-off artists.
There’s not much more to tell, or that I should tell, except that I wound up back in Nashville when all was said and done, just ten miles from Music Row. You could say I made it into one of Music City’s closed clubs after all.
It’s not so bad. There’s a hell of a band here. Best I’ve ever played with. Besides that, I’ve got plenty of time to write music. And the people here, they appreciate my songs. I haven’t played a cover in years.
Speaking of covers, I saw a little five-by-three-inch tract lying on a table in chow hall the other day. There was a sketch on the front of a man behind bars, looking up at Jesus in the sky. I flipped through it. The story was pathetic, the drawings were too. Nothing like what Doreen and I did in that church basement way back when. Nothing like that at all.
Thompson, Steven—Inmate #00225301
Riverbend Maximum Security Institution
7475 Cockrill Bend Blvd, Nashville, TN 37209