“Just setting up.”
He stormed in and grabbed her by the arm, his long, thin fingers digging into her skin right through her jacket. He hauled her outside the room, kicking the door shut behind them. “I told you never to talk to the clients.”
Jen hesitated. She needed the money from this gig, but she also needed to lay down the law. She took a deep breath, then met Jacks’s eyes and served up the death stare she’d learned from another guitar player years ago—the look you gave band leaders to make them realize they’d crossed a line.
“Take. Your. Fucking. Hand. Off. Me.”
Jacks let go, smiling as he did. It was one of those asshole ex-rocker smiles that said he thought he was still too sexy to have some chick with a guitar tell him off, but if that didn’t work, he’d plead harmless old man.
She kept glaring. “I’m not kidding. Don’t ever touch me again. I’m here to play guitar, that’s it. I don’t want any of your shit. I’m not your date. We’re not going to flirt.”
“But you’ll actually play the guitar, right?” he asked.
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. Just go set up your goddamned rig and don’t let me catch you talking to the clients again.”
“The kid talked to me. What was I supposed to do? Tell him to shut up?”
“If he talks to you again, pretend he isn’t there. You’re here to play the songs I tell you, and then leave. Until you hear otherwise from me, mind your own business. In exchange, you get three hundred bucks, and I promise not to look at your ass when you’re soloing. Think you can handle that?”
“Whatever,” she said and went back into the room.
Creep.
#
For the next half hour she followed Jacks’s instructions to the letter, plugging in her amp, checking her strings, tuning both the acoustic and the Strat, all the while ignoring the kid.
“How long have you been playing?” he asked. When that got no response he said, “It’s my birthday, you know.”
“Yeah? How old—” she stopped herself. Fucking Jacks and his stupid rules.
“I’m going to be nine. The doctors said I’d never live past five, but they were wrong.”
She looked at the pale skin stretched over bony features. He may have beaten the doctor’s predictions, but he wasn’t likely to see ten.
Jen set down the tuned acoustic and then yanked the patch cable out, plugging it into the Ricky. It only took a couple of seconds to tune—that guitar almost never lost its tuning. She flipped on the standby switch on the amp and was going to do a couple of test chords, but Jacks appeared at the door again.
“Leave it.”
“I need to set my amp sounds,” she said.
“Do it with the acoustic and the Strat. Don’t play the Rickenbacker until I tell you. You’ll play the acoustic and then the Strat. If and when I tell you to, you’ll bring forth the Rickenbacker.”
“Bring forth?” Who talks like that? She set the Ricky back in its case and plugged the acoustic back in, strumming a few chords from “With a Little Help from My Friends.” She glanced at the kid to see if he liked it. He stuck his tongue out at her.
I’m surrounded by heathens, she thought.
“Meet me downstairs when you’re done,” Jacks told her.
“For what?”
“Band meeting, of course.”
Great. A speech about who was boss mixed with some pontification on his personal philosophy of live performance.
This was going to be the gig from hell.
#
“The first rule,” Jacks said, staring at each of them in turn, “is that once I start the song, you don’t stop playing until I give you the signal.” His gaze swept the other two. “What’s the rule?”
Levon scuffed a toe on the kitchen’s linoleum floor and Lucy Bottom slumped against a cabinet, but they dutifully repeated his words: “Don’t stop playing until Johnny gives the signal.”
“What is this?” Jen asked, suddenly irritated past the point of caution. “Some kind of fucking cult? You don’t think we know how to play in a goddamned cover band?”
Jacks, far from being angered by her rebellion, seemed heartened. “Cool. Okay, so what’s rule number two?”
“Oh, for fuck’s—” Shut up, Jen, she thought. So what if he’s a weirdo? They’re all weirdos, and you need the money.
Levon seemed eager to please, or at least to get that over with. “Don’t pay attention to the audience.”
“And why don’t we pay attention to the audience?” Jacks asked, with all the patronizing smugness of a primary school teacher.
“Because the audience is the enemy,” Lucy replied.
“Good,” Jacks said, wrapping his arms around Levon’s and Lucy’s shoulders.
Jen no longer had any trouble understanding how Johnny Jacks had descended into playing private parties for sick kids.
“Oh,” she said. “What about requests?”
“No requests,” the skinny singer replied. “That ain’t how the game is played.” He locked eyes with her. “We clear on that, Axe Girl?”
“Please don’t call me that.”
His stare remained. “Clear?”
“Fine. Whatever.”
“Good.” He removed his arms from the bass player and drummer and stuck his hand out, middle and ring fingers pressed into his palm, index and pinky straight out like devil horns. “Join with me, brother and sisters.” Lucy and Levon complied, and then all three had their hands out making the idiotic gesture that Jen hadn’t seen anyone over high school age do since…well, high school. “Axe Girl,” he said.
“I’m fine, thanks.”
“Just do it,” Levon urged.
“No.” She was all set to launch into a tirade because at this point sleeping in her car seemed better than playing with these psychos, but then Johnny Jacks reached his free hand into the back pocket of his skinny black jeans and pulled out a wad of bills.
“Three hundred, like we agreed,” he said, thrusting the money at her. “You decide to walk from here on out, you keep the cash.”
She reached for the wad, but he pulled his hand up. “But first…”
Jen stared at the money, then at her fellow musicians with their devil-horn salute, then back at the money. “You’re really going to make me do this?”
“Please, Jen,” Lucy chimed in. “It’s important.”
Ugh. I’m going to hate myself in the morning. She stuck out her hand and made the gesture, shaking her arm for emphasis.
Jacks grinned like the self-satisfied eight-year-old he was. “All right, my babies, time to rock this shit all the way to the gates of hell!”
#
“It’s MY birthday, and I don’t want any stupid music,” the kid declared as Jen, Lucy, and Levon got their instruments ready. Jacks stood by the bedroom window facing away from them as if he were a superstar meditating before leaping onto an arena stage to sing for fifty thousand fans.
“It’s okay, Kyle,” the kid’s mother said from the doorway. “Just try it and see what you think.”
“No! They’re shit. I can already tell.” He pointed at Jen. “Just look at her. Bet she can’t solo worth a damn.”
Little prick.
“Don’t be like that, kiddo,” the father said. He stepped past his wife into the room and instantly Jacks turned, eyes blazing.
“Get the fuck out. You know the deal.”
Jen fully expected the guy to take three strides into the room and punch Jacks in the face, but instead he bowed his head and backed out. “Sorry. Sorry, I just—”
“And close the door.”
Jen looked at Levon, waiting for some explanation of this insanity, but the drummer just shrugged with a “Hey, takes all kinds” sort of look. The kid—Kyle—apparently found it all hilariously funny.
“Did you see that?” He looked at Jen. “Daddy’s got no balls. Mom says it all the time to her friends.”
The level of disfunction in this household was terrifying in its ordinariness. Jen blocked it out by focusing on retuning on her acoustic and waiting for Jacks to tell her what the first song would be.
The singer paced the length of each wall of the room like a panther looking for gaps in his cage. When he got to the kid’s bed, he looked down at Kyle. The boy shrank under his blankets, which was a perfectly natural thing to do when faced with an emaciated, corpse-like old man in skinny jeans, with long gray hair hanging wild, and eyes looking like something from an old Iron Maiden album cover.
“Don’t,” the boy said.
“Shut up, motherfucker,” was Johnny’s reply.
“Hey man, come on,” Jen said. “Don’t.”
He turned his head and shot her a look that made her slightly more afraid for herself than the kid. “Did I tell you to talk?”
The wad of cash in her pocket was telling her to pack up her guitar and walk, but Lucy put a hand on her arm.
“It’s okay, just go with it.”
Five minutes, she told herself. One song. Then if this shit didn’t get real normal real quick, she was out of here.
Jacks left the kid’s bedside and came to stand with the rest of the band. “Grave Digger,” he said. “The Joe Cocker version.”
Not actually the worst choice in the world, Jen thought, waiting for Levon to count in with his drum sticks. Cocker’s version of Procol Harum’s barely known B-side love song was slow and soulful, a little on the raspy side, but that would probably suit Jacks’s voice. She got her fingers into place to play the opening riff, but Johnny started without waiting for the count or for her to play.
With a thick, deep and dirty voice, he began. “Where…did we bury…those kisses…long entombed…”
And then everything went straight to hell.
#
It’s hard for the human voice to overcome even as small a PA system as Jacks had brought, but the kid in the bed had no trouble doing it. The scream he unleashed on them made Jen’s ears feel like they were going to start bleeding. She nearly dropped the guitar, figuring for sure the kid was having some kind of seizure. But Levon kept the beat going steady, and Lucy, still holding down the bass line, jostled Jen with her arm to tell her not to stop playing.
“Please!” Kyle wailed. “Make him stop! Make him stop!”
“Lend…me your hand…” Jacks went on singing, with all the intensity and preposterous rock poses as if the tiny bedroom was filled with fifty thousand screaming teenage girls throwing their panties at the aging rocker.
If the chords hadn’t been so dead simple, Jen would’ve dropped the rhythm for sure, because at this point, she couldn’t decide whether to keep playing or call the paramedics. Or the cops. Why the fuck were the kid’s parents not kicking open the door?
The band hit the first chorus and Kyle started shaking, his scrawny hands gripping the sides of his mattress. Soon the whole bed was rattling, and foamy spit dripped out the sides of his mouth. Still Jacks kept singing and the band kept playing.
“I’m your gra-ay-ay-ve digger…”
The screams got worse, like an insect burrowing deep inside Jen’s ear canals. The kid hurled himself up and down on the mattress, the bed’s metal legs carving scratches into the wood floor. She looked around, hoping to see the solution to all this insanity even as her fingers kept finding the chords on the guitar neck.
Stop playing, she told herself. Nothing’s worth whatever the hell these cult psychos are doing to this kid.
Jacks lifted a fist high, then jammed his elbow down—the sign to end the song. Had they gotten past the last chorus? All she could hear was the sound of the kid shrieking his lungs out. Her eyes were blurred from tears she hadn’t realized she was shedding.
“Scream out the Demon,” Jacks called out.
“What?”
“Motley Crüe,” Lucy whispered fiercely.
Jen couldn’t remember that tune, so she had to wait for Lucy to start it up on the bass and followed along as best she could. Levon kept a heavy beat going on the kick drum, punching in with the background vocals.
“Yes. Shout. Scream the demon out!”
If she had any doubts about this being some perverse form of child abuse, they were gone when Johnny Jacks started dancing wildly about the room, grinding out the lead vocal in some mad, gesticulating performance that freaked Jen out so much it took until the second verse before she found something else that freaked her out even more: the kid.
Kyle stopped shaking and sat up in his bed, a grin on his face as wide as if he’d just shoplifted his first nudie magazine. His eyes had gone milky white because the eyeballs were rolled up into his head and he was laughing so hard she could hear him over Lucy’s bass line and Levon’s drumming.
“What the hell is going on?” she asked Lucy when she couldn’t stand it anymore.
“Hell is what’s going on. Now shut the fuck up and keep playing if you don’t want to end up there yourself.”
Kyle bobbed his head back and forth, as though lost in an ecstatic trance. Jacks sang louder and harder, like the two were locked in some sort of deadly struggle and trying to prove who was in control.
They hit the end of that song. Without even calling it out, Jacks started singing Ramble On by Led Zeppelin. Fortunately, this was a tune she knew, and so kicked in smoothly with Jimmy Page’s riffs.
Jacks turned to her, eyes blazing, and shouted, “Not the acoustic, you idiot. Switch guitars!” Jen let Lucy and Levon hold up the rhythm as she put the acoustic down and reached for the Ricky. “Not the Ricky!” Jacks shouted. She put that down, grabbed the Strat, and kicked into a solo.
Kyle was on his hands and knees on the bed, right near the bottom edge like a dog getting ready to leap off. His eyes looked nowhere in particular but he sniffed the air as if he could smell her playing.
“Bitch got no soul,” he whispered.
Whispered?
How in hell could she possibly hear the kid whisper over the music?
“Play faster, slut,” he growled, and it sounded as if he stood on a stool right behind her, his lips touching her earlobe. Jen shivered and the ring finger of her left hand missed the fret. The buzz it produced was like a thousand wasps stinging her face, swarming inside her mouth and over her eyes.
“Keep your shit together, Axe Girl,” Jacks said. He stood right in front of her, making her feel trapped. Caged. Still, she pushed through the solo until Johnny picked up the vocal again. By the time the song was done, she was dripping sweat. Her shirt clung to her chest and torso, her jeans were soaked and too tight around her waist, as though her body had turned into nothing but sagging layers of skin and fat.
Jacks sang three more songs, and by the end of the third she couldn’t remember what the first two had been. All the while, Kyle raced around the tiny circumference prescribed by his twin mattress, alternating between screaming, and chortling at them.
When Johnny signaled her to play a solo again, the kid pulled down his pajama pants and pissed on the floor, wiggling his hips and sending the stream sputtering into the air towards them. A droplet of something landed on Jen’s lip and she started to gag.
“It’s just sweat,” Lucy told her, thumb slapping the bottom string of her bass. “He can’t touch us yet. Just don’t drop any more notes.”
Crazy cult assholes, Jen thought, but she didn’t stop playing; she was too scared. Whatever was wrong with these people, she couldn’t be sure someone wouldn’t slit her throat if she stopped going along with the game. So, she kept shredding on the Stratocaster, barely aware of what key she was in.
“Four more bars,” Johnny called out.
Jen looked up. Kyle lay flat on his back. Her fingers flew up the neck looking for a passably decent way out of the solo, but as she did, she finally stopped thinking everyone around her was crazy and started wondering if she was the one who’d lost her mind, because Kyle was now floating three feet above the bed.
“Shit!” she yelled
and dropped her pick.
The kid fell back to the mattress. Jacks turned on her, fists clenched. She flinched involuntarily thinking the skinny freak was about to hit her. But he didn’t. He just gave a nod to Levon who train crashed the end of the song.
Then, for the first time since they’d started, the room was silent. No drums, no instruments, no Johnny Jacks dancing around singing raucously, no kid screaming.
Silence.
Jen was so exhausted she could barely keep on her feet. “What the fuck was that?”
“That was the first set,” Jacks said.
#
Jen still had the Strat hanging off her hunched shoulders as she hurried from the room. She should’ve packed it up along with her other guitars and the amp, but by then she was too terrified to do anything but skulk down the stairs and make for the front door.
“Smoke break?”
Jacks stood in the shadows out on the front lawn, smoke from his joint already making her gag. Her ears were still buzzing. She couldn’t draw a decent breath to save her life.
“What the fuck was that in there?” she demanded.
“What do you think that was?”
She took the Strat off her shoulder, partly because it was getting heavy and partly because she might need something to hit Jacks with. “Tell me it wasn’t a…shit, I can’t believe I’m saying this. Tell me this isn’t some kind of exorcism.”
He took a drag from his joint. “Of course, it’s an exorcism. What else would it be?”
She snatched the joint from him and sucked in a long drag that made her head spin. She’d stopped smoking years ago. “And you’re what? Trying to force it out with rock music?”
He accepted the joint back and gave her a toothy grin. “What the fuck else would we use to get rid of it? Prayers? And don’t waste your time,” he added, dropping the remains of the joint on the lawn and crushing it with the heel of his boot.
“With what?”
“Telling yourself you imagined it. It’s real, kid.”
She wanted to call him a liar but doubted that would do any good. “Let’s say…let’s say for a second, I believed any of it. Are we done? You prayed the gay away or sang the evil out or whatever?”
“Not fucking likely. It’s a three-set show, Axe Girl.”
Relics, Wrecks and Ruins Page 17
