Pop the Clutch

by Eric J. Guignard

  I’ll come back to that.

  We all got crap from the folks, because it was a small town and we were towing a different line than they were. Poor Belinda was tormented by all those high school jerks, day after day. Knocking the tail light out on her car, rubbing dog shit in her locker. Sometimes at night they would knock over her mailbox or throw things at the house, constantly wrapping it with toilet paper.

  There was no end to it. Seemed like it was the entire school, with the exception of the band, and a few folks here and there who weren’t too popular either, and wanted to keep their head down.

  It really got to Belinda. All she wanted to do was make music, but the anger was boiling inside of her, and sometimes in practice I could feel that anger coming out, and we’d have to take her mic away. We could play full on, and even if she sang without one, you could hear her as if she was standing in front of a hot mic belting it out. It was enough to make me think of those sirens and their songs.

  Well, we picked up a few gigs here and there, and then we were out of school, and the kind of music we were playing was really catching on, even in our home town, and I’m sure the kids who had given us hell were now wearing their jeans cuffed and their hair longer and slicked down with oil, but that didn’t change how we felt about them.

  We went for a year on tour, if it’s fair to call making the Chitlin’ Circuit by car a tour. Went in that ragged car of Belinda’s, the bass strapped to the top, and Jap, as everyone called Mary Lou by now, had a station wagon, and that carried the rest of the equipment, along with her at the wheel and one of us in the front passenger seat. We traded riding and driving, though Belinda always drove her own car.

  And let me tell you, pretty as Belinda was, she became even more so, right down seductive-looking. And performing brought out an inner-glow. She’d stand on stage and start to sing and start to wiggle, and you’d see the men in the audience drop their jaws, and you’d see the women grow small. And then the songs would keep coming, especially Tremble, because when she sang that one, perhaps because she wrote it, there was something that ran through the notes, like Adam and Eve’s serpent squirming all around, and you couldn’t help but think when the show was over and everyone left, a lot of cars must have ended up in local passion spots, rocking to a rhythm inherent to men and women since the beginning of time.

  It seemed alright to me, the way we were going, making decent money, and the band was loving it, and I wrote a couple of numbers we performed. Silly stuff actually, and I’m glad they didn’t survive, at least they weren’t recorded, but to hear Belinda sing them . . . Well, she could have sung little Miss Muffet and moved your soul.

  By the second year we were out there, riding and performing, living in tourist courts and eating at greasy spoons, the word was out. We even ended up recording for Blue Siren records, just that one song as I said, Tremble, the one that’s survived and thrilled audiences for years with its savage performance, but let me tell you, they had to have Belinda stand six feet from the microphone, and as strong a performance as she gave, the way her voice trembled when she said, “Tremble to the moon,” well, on the road, she did it better. Her voice got stronger day by day, and at night we’d lie in bed in some roach-infested motel, and we’d talk, and there was good talk, but it always came back to high school. That whole experience was like a bleeding wound to her. You couldn’t put enough gauze or pressure on that wound to staunch it.

  I remember saying after we recorded Tremble, and it was getting radio play, “We’ve left that hole in the road. We got a song out there, and it’s a hit. We’re on our way.”

  Course, we didn’t know then we weren’t really going to make any real money off that song, not with the contract we signed. We were a rockabilly group, not a firm of lawyers. So, we weren’t that much on our way after all.

  But we would have lived and learned from that experience, and we were supposed to record a B side, which is why for a long time Tremble only had radio play, and no record, until someone got wise and just put the song on both sides and released it, making it a unique item; but as I said, it didn’t do us much good financially, and in the long run it’s made us nothing more than an interesting note in Rockabilly history.

  Still, had we continued on, had Belinda not harvested anger from a field fertilized by the bad blood of everyone who had ever treated someone like crap, we’d have done okay, I think. But she couldn’t quit farming that field, and when she said she wanted to see if we could go through our home town of Badger Creek, I wasn’t so sure. Then I thought: this may be how she’s going to reconcile this stuff, how she’s going to quit farming that field of hate, and so I worked to set it up.

  It was easy. By then we had a certain fame, due to Tremble and word of mouth, so we were set for what would become a cold winter night full of threatening skies. But until that day arrived, we moved on down the road in dry sunshine, doing our gigs.

  By this time, Belinda’s voice was like a siren, and I mean both kinds. Yet, it was controlled, and it was beautiful. It was so mesmerizing I would almost forget to play, and finally, one night before a gig, she gave us all wax ear plugs, said, “Tonight, you’re gonna need these.”

  Night before we were to play in Badger Creek, we performed in a little town called Gladewater. It was at a rodeo grounds. She went out there and sang, and even with the open air, the seats all around, you could feel her notes as if they were thugs, moving about the crowd, nearly shoving people down.

  I was glad for those plugs of wax. I was glad we were in such an open place and the audience wasn’t right up in front of us, but was instead in those wrap-around arena seats, because even that far away, Belinda’s voice was a mighty rumble. I won’t kid you, even with those plugs, on the stage, I felt faint once, and when it was over, there was blood on my wax plugs. Belinda had stood in front of a microphone, but ladies and gents, it wasn’t turned on.

  ***

  I GUESS IT WAS MID-DAY when we rolled into Badger Creek in our two cars, put ourselves up at the Franklin Motor Inn, a little run of shacks on the outskirts of town near a cafe that served what could only be called the worst food in three counties. I had eaten there a few times while growing up in Badger Creek, and it hadn’t improved.

  Night before, Belinda had been quiet. Usually we talked while we lay in bed, and snuggled close, but that night she lay there and looked at the ceiling, and the times I tried to initiate a conversation, suggest how we might move the band beyond a road group, record some more, but with a better contract next time, she’d grunt and so on, but it was pretty quickly understood that she didn’t have any interest in talking. Her world was in her head, everything else was pretty much void.

  During the night, after I’d drifted off, I awoke to a strange feeling in my ears. It wasn’t a sound, exactly, more of a sensation; a vibration in the head, the kind I used to get when I was at her house in bed and the train rolled by outside.

  I sat up, pushed the covers to my knees. There was this little table across the room with a chair in front of it. Belinda was in that chair with the table light on. I watched her place a glass of water on the table. She took a breath so deep it was as if she were trying to suck all the air out of the room, and from the way her head moved and her shoulders rolled, it was as if she was about to belt out something from a song. But no sound came out. As I said, it was a sensation. She was reaching way down inside, and like a silent dog whistle, something was coming out, because that glass of water was rocking on that table like it was about to leap.

  And then I saw the water rise up as if by high tide, and the water danced in the air like a water spout, and the glass broke with a sharp crack and collapsed in pieces on the table, followed by the water.

  I felt cold. I felt numb.

  Belinda turned off the light, and as I eased under the covers again, she came back to bed.

  ***

  WE GOT TO THE HIGH SCHOOL auditorium late that afternoon, set up. Belinda was still quiet. We did a run-through on
the tunes, but she held back, sang on one of them, and sang so soft she needed the mic, but we didn’t say anything, just let her go through it. We knew she could belt when she wanted to.

  After practice, we were out back of the auditorium, me and Jap. The others were inside doing whatever, and Jap says to me, “Ronald, I’m scared of her.”

  “That’s silly,” I said, even though I didn’t think it was all that silly.

  “We do this run, I think I’m out,” Jap said. “It isn’t fun anymore.”

  “We’re going to record more,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t know. I got a feeling we aren’t going to record anything.”

  That night, as the doors were opened and the kids filed in amongst a few older folks in the back to chaperone the event, Belinda looked out through a split in the auditorium curtain, said, “I recognize a lot of them.”

  I looked out as well. Yep. Lot of kids we had graduated with, and lots more we hadn’t. I saw Chris, Sharon, and Dee, a few others that had been in their crowd. As in school, they moved in a pack, but now dressed not too unlike we were dressed. Weekend hip-cats, arriving at the station after the train had left.

  Right before time to go on, Belinda gathered us together just off-stage, and handed us all plugs. “These are supposed to be better. Made to mute gunfire. And we need to move the amps from where they are, point them at the crowd. I want you behind them. You can play this stuff in your sleep. Like usual, I’m going to end with Tremble. During that song, when you see me step up and turn on the mic, that’s your cue.”

  “To do . . . do . . . do what?” Cliff said.

  “To leave,” she said. “It’ll be cool. Just stop playing and walk off. In fact, leave the building.”

  I wasn’t sure how cool that was, and of course, I had an inkling what was going on, but you know, you can’t think of something like that and believe it’s real.

  You just can’t.

  ***

  CAME THE NIGHT AND THE TIME, and the auditorium was full. We had the plugs in our ears, but truth to tell, she didn’t belt it out. She sang gently, but it was still strong for anyone else. That’s the thing. Her voice could fill a room and make it feel as if it was coming out of the amps, but it wasn’t. No one could do that but her, and people loved it, even if they had no idea what they were really hearing, and had no idea that the microphone wasn’t even turned on.

  So, away we went, and I tell you, we’d never been better. Maybe it was because of where we were, who was in that crowd. We were showing him we weren’t just a bunch of misfits from Badger Creek.

  They loved the rocking numbers and the smoother ballads, and they started to stand and dance in front of their seats, and then in the aisle, and as they did, Belinda brought the volume up, and man that dancing increased, became savage and sexy, and in the back, I could see the chaperones were nervous. To try and contain this bunch would be like walking into a den of lions with a switch and an attitude; it wouldn’t have gone well.

  In the front rows, as was according to custom, were those who had graduated but a year or so ago. For them, all the unkind words, the busted guitar, were forgotten and unimportant. They had a classmate who had scored big in recognition, if not in money, and they felt they were a part of her success, as if they had boosted and encouraged her all along, and that the things they had done had been nothing more than just clean fun.

  I watched them smile, and I watched them dance, and I felt an anger in me. Nothing to compare to that wound in Belinda, but it was certainly enough to make me feel their hypocrisy rise up and onto the stage like a living entity.

  Belinda was singing one of her new compositions, “I See You On The Street.”

  I see you on the street.

  You always look so fine.

  Like there’s nothing painful on your mind.

  But me, I’m a walking, talking, empty shell.

  I’m a ringless bell.

  I’m a heart turned cold.

  You’ve left me unhappy on an empty road.

  If things had worked out, that would have been the B side to Tremble. It was a kind of ballad, the shelter before the storm.

  Belinda wrapped up the song, shouted out at the audience, “Do you want to Tremble?”

  As one they shouted they did, and there was near pandemonium. That song was still hot on the radio and hot on the wax, having been released with it on both sides of the .45. Tremble was simple, catchy, and raw. But it was the voice that made it special.

  “This’ll be our last song for tonight,” and she smiled so big the Cheshire cat would have been envious.

  She looked back at us, raised her hand, and the crowd became silent. She held it there, teasing them for a moment, dropped it, and we hit it.

  Let me tell you. We had never been so on the money. We rode those notes like bucking horses, and we stayed in the saddle. And outside, the cold winter night had turned savage. Through the high auditorium windows I saw the lightning stitching across the sky. And the dark clouds were visible in those flashes, and they rolled with the drums, and they tumbled with the bass, and the wild, wicked clouds began to cry. Rain splattered the windows, struck the roof like pellets of steel, and my guitar screamed, and the drums did bop, and the base did thump, and the sax did wail, driving that music straight to the bone.

  As the music rose and Belinda’s voice soared, the rafters rattled like old dry bones, the floor bucked up, the walls shimmied and began to moan, the windows cracked, and the air, as if from some deep Arctic tomb, blew in, lifted greasy hair like invisible jacks, made dresses whip like flags.

  Even on stage we trembled with the song. It was as if we were standing in electric quicksand.

  That’s when the song paused and I did my solo, and let me tell you, I was clawing that one out. I was on fire, and when I finished, Belinda looked back at us, and nodded, then stepped up to the microphone and turned it on.

  Everyone had a feeling. They just knew. Jap dropped her sticks and made for the exit, followed by everyone else unplugging their instruments, heading for the door. Everyone but me. I kept playing.

  Belinda looked back, and the look on her face was both brave and sad and proud and lonely. I know that’s a lot to assign to a face, but I assure you, it was all there. All of her generations of wailing women, all of the things they’d suffered as the “fairer sex.” All of the calls and whistles and ass pinches and insults and expectations. You could feel and hear what Odysseus heard that time he was strapped to the mast, and his men, with wax in their ears, rowed with all their might to get past the home of the sirens, to move on out into calmer waters.

  I nodded at her. She nodded back, turned to the mic, opened her bright red lips—

  And out came her voice, a wild, leaping Cerberus escaped through the gates of hell.

  That’s when the fun went out of everyone’s eyes. That’s when they rose up like the water in that glass in the motel room, rose up on their toes, and like the song said, they trembled. They trembled so hard, they trembled so fast, the boys’ greasy hair stood up on end. The girls were lashed by their own pony tails, and those with high-up hair, well, you saw it collapse; an avalanche of hair-do tumbling down hill. You could see their cheeks swell and you could see the flesh on their faces start to peel. Bones cracked and poked through the jeans, or through the flesh on their knees beneath sweat-wet dresses; legs bent and buckled, and they began to topple, and writhe on the floor like electric eels.

  Belinda’s voice rose up, dropped down, moved left and right, and all around. Someone screamed and the lights went out. The world inside the auditorium was as black as the dark side of the moon. My ears were bleeding even with the wax in them.

  When the lights went out my electric guitar lost its power, and that’s when my courage failed me. It was as if the music had sustained me, but then you might say my common sense kicked in. I glanced at Belinda, but the way she was standing, smiling, watching all that mayhem, I knew I was on my own. I dropped the strap over m
y head and the guitar hit the stage with a ring, and I grappled for a way out, bounced against the wall and eventually found the opening, and then the exit. Right before I was out of there I looked back, and there were bodies still trying to dance, clawing their way onto the stage, clutching at Belinda like a vanilla treat, and then the roof sagged, and I ran for my life.

  ***

  THE WAY THE PAPER TOLD IT, it was an electrical fire that had caught breath from the storm and lit up the whole auditorium. Made out like the building was unsafe, and just collapsed, that it wasn’t up to standards, and you know, maybe it wasn’t. The wind and fire tore up the wood and steel like a piece of wet cardboard left out in a rainstorm.

  Even the survivors, though few, didn’t know what had happened, or they were too in shock to tell the real story, or perhaps they just couldn’t understand it. But I knew, and as time passed, suspicions grew. I’d known that first night Belinda and me had laid in bed and she’d told me about her family that there was hell in the making. I’d sensed that anger burning up inside her and growing and twirling for some time now, but I never said a word.

  Next day I tried to find the guys, but I didn’t. They hid from me, you want to know it true. I didn’t blame them. They thought I had been in on it, I guess, and I suppose in a way, I had. I knew what Belinda was capable of, but I just didn’t want to believe it. And truth be told, there was a part of me, maybe a part bigger than I’d like to admit, that felt like those people had it coming. That they had brought that doom and destruction down on themselves and deserved every last lick of what had happened to them. Eventually I quit trying to catch up and make nice with the band. I heard Jap died in a car wreck a few years later and Cliffy, well, I didn’t know what happened to him.