“Little ass kisser,” Johnny said with a smile.
Billy laughed. It was a broken sound that turned into a cough. “I don’t think the kids know she’s my mother. Anyway, Evan’s the hero. He’s a firefighter. A hero, I am not. I just feel guilty when I’m around them.”
“Billy...” Johnny leaned in and waited until Billy stopped stamping out his butt, brushed the hair out of his eyes, and looked up. “What’s up? What do you have to feel guilty about? Success? Your father dying? It’s not your fault.”
Billy said nothing.
“Jesus, Billy. Is that what you think, your father had a heart attack because of you? What, did you make the news for some sex and drugs episode? ‘Cause I must have missed it.”
“No, nothing like that.”
“Then what?”
Billy drummed his fingers on the table and said, “Johnny, can I ask you a weird question? I know it’s been a long time since we talked, and you might not want to tell me, so you can just say so.”
“Go ahead.”
“Remember in high school, you started reading those books about, I don’t know, magic, the occult?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, I know we were metal-head kids, and every teenager wants power, right? Over girls and adults, mostly because you know you have none. I still play with that dark mystique and kids respond to it.”
“I know what you mean. There’s more to it than that.”
“Is there? That’s what I’m asking. In your experience, is there something to it?”
Johnny sat back and took a deep breath. “I was probably drawn to the occult for the reasons you mentioned. But it led me to other things. That dark taboo claptrap eventually leads to deeper books, if you’re serious about finding the real deal. For me it led to studying Hebrew Kabalah.”
Billy smiled. “Who knew heavy metal album art could be a gateway to harder stuff—Jewish mysticism. That would have given the PMRC pause for thought.”
“I doubt it.”
“You still into it?”
“Not so much anymore. It’s just techniques for altering your consciousness at will, getting in touch with God or enlightened mind or whatever you want to call it. Like yoga. But when Angie and I got married and opened the restaurant, I didn’t have as much time for spirituality. We wanted to start a family. I stopped playing, too, but that was more of a career choice. I knew if I was living in a van, I’d end up divorced.”
“A lot of people I know in L.A. are into witchcraft and Kabalah. I never took it that seriously myself, but some people I respect do. Still, it’s L.A. Tom Cruise and John Travolta seem like they have their shit together, but they’re into Scientology. Anyway, what I wanted to ask is: do you believe in… spiritual entities?”
“I do.”
“Like angels and demons?”
“For lack of better terms, sure.”
“Do you believe in the Devil?”
Johnny laughed. “No. I don’t think there’s any such thing, exactly.”
Billy shook another cigarette out of the pack. He twirled it in his long, thin fingers without lighting it.
“So are you going to tell me your story?” Johnny asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Come on, people don’t usually ask the kind of questions you’re asking unless something weird happened to them.”
Billy lit the cigarette. Until now he had been carrying around a vague notion, but he hadn’t articulated even to himself exactly what he thought had happened. He said, “The night my father died, I had a really good scare.”
“Did you have a dream about his death? I’ve heard of that happening.”
“No. It was a dog. Not in a dream, a real dog almost attacked me, scared me pretty bad. But here’s the weird part: the thing I was most aware of at the time was my heart pounding.”
“And you think that through some… invisible connection, you may have caused your father’s heart attack. Half a world away.”
“Is it possible? I mean, he’s my father. I’ve heard stories about mothers who can sense when their kids are in danger.”
“Billy, you probably need to unplug for a while and get some rest. I think you’re a lot more stressed and burned-out than you realize.”
“But don’t you believe in psychic connections, mind acting on matter over a distance, something like that. Is that possible?”
“Okay. I think it is, but I don’t think it applies here. If you really think about what you’re saying, it’s kind of narcissistic.”
“What?”
“You think you’re responsible for everything. For your father’s second heart attack, which had nothing to do with you. Think about it, instead of wondering about his health and his eating habits, you’re thinking about what was happening to you at the time. Your emotions are so powerful they can kill someone? That is what you’re suggesting, right?”
“But you just said—”
“It’s not your fault. Stardom is doing a number on your head, but listen to me man, it was not your fault.”
“Wait a minute…”
“Seriously, Billy, you are not the cause of everything. Why do you think I have those little heart icons next to certain dishes on the menu? Men your dad’s age have heart attacks sometimes. Your dog story is a coincidence. A synchronicity at best.”
“Isn’t that a Police song?”
“Yeah, and a book by Jung. It means an acausal connection. No cause and effect, just a remarkable meaningful coincidence. How did you get attacked by a dog, anyway? Don’t you have a bodyguard?”
“I was being stupid. But it seemed more ominous than a coincidence at the time. And ever since, I can’t get that Robert Johnson song out of my head, ‘Hellhound Blues.’ They said he sold his soul to the Devil.”
“That’s just because white guys were jealous of him getting so much pussy.”
“I think he must have believed it, or he wouldn’t have written those songs about it.”
“You said it yourself. It’s a mystique. Look, Billy, your father just died. You need to take a break and get some perspective.”
“Too much fucking perspective,” Billy said in a perfectly convincing English accent.
“Spinal Tap?”
“The immortal words of Nigel Tufnel.”
Johnny laughed. “It’s good to know some things don’t change. It’s good to see you, man. You should come home more often.”
“Yeah, that’s what I hear.”
“So you think you’ve got hellhounds on your trail, huh? I get the feeling there’s more you’re not telling me.”
“If you have some booze in this joint, I’ve got a story that just might change your mind about the Devil.”
* * *
Echo
By the time his voice cracked on the high note at the climax of “Crucifixation,” Billy Moon had decided that tonight was the night he would kill himself. No point in doing it on stage, though—the bar was empty.
It was a Tuesday night in January of 1994 and Purple Jesus was playing a gig at O’Niells, a dank little dive a few blocks from the Mystic River. The barroom was set apart from the room with the foot-high, beer-stained stage by a half wall over which the silhouettes of a few regulars could be seen nursing pints and watching the Bruins game. Even the house soundman had ducked in there to drink and watch the game, leaving Billy’s mic to whistle and howl with feedback the guy pretended not to hear.
Billy knew he should be angry about it, but all he could feel was the black shroud of depression winding around him as he sang, making it hard to draw enough breath to deliver the last line when the final distorted chord receded. He didn't even bother singing it, didn't look at his mates, just stomped on a footswitch and fiddled with his tuning. As if it mattered whether or not the instruments were in tune tonight.
A few weeks earlier, Billy had stopped taking his Zoloft. The drug kept the black shroud down around his knees, but Billy knew it was doing so by suppressing the very emo
tions that he considered his stock in trade. To write, he needed to feel something. But the only song idea the un-medicated muse had granted him so far was a clunky title, ‘Hope Prolongs Misery.’ And that wasn’t even original, he had to admit, dressed up in a new melody or not.
The phrase had been with him since high school when Kim McLane, the first punk chick he’d ever had a crush on, had felt him staring at the nape of her neck in Sociology class and, turning to lean over her fiberglass seat, had whispered the words in his ear. Hope prolongs misery. It was the inverse of the American Dream.
For a little while, there had been Friday and Saturday night gigs. Club owners seemed satisfied that their little crowd drank like a big one, but somehow, the moment when a small following might have grown had passed and they were back to Tuesday nights and the slapback echo of bodiless spaces.
Jim Cassman, the bassist and default bandleader talked the guys into playing a few more songs and treating the empty gig like a rehearsal, but by that time, Billy already knew there was nothing to rehearse for. When Jim finally laid his bass in its case, and Andy crossed his sticks on the snare drum, Billy didn’t hang around to help load the van. He picked up his own guitar case without a word and walked out the back door while his bandmates called for their complimentary pitcher of Bud.
Outside, the sky was a luminous battleship gray, infused with urban light pollution, snowflakes swirling around in the streetlights like ash. He walked toward the river, the wet slushy snow saturating his combat boots until his feet started to go numb. Passing under the green girders of the Tobin Bridge, he saw the sign they had posted for jumpers: DESPERATE? DEPRESSED? HOPE PROLONGS MISERY. He wasn’t sure what that last part really said. Probably some 800 number.
The Tobin Bridge does not provide a scenic view of a romantic city skyline, just smoke stacks with pulsing red lights and flickering strobes, towering over vast paved lots scattered with forklifts, the crumbling asphalt somewhere giving way to the ice floes migrating down the black river. Not much to remind you of what you have to live for.
He reached the halfway point, sat down on the railing and took his guitar out of the case. He would play one last encore for the night, and then exit stage left. It felt impossibly important that the last song he and the boys had half-heartedly trudged through not be the last thing he ever sang. The last song of a lifetime should be something with heart. One more time, with feeling. Take it from the bridge. He laughed. A broken sound that seemed to come from someone else.
For a moment, he couldn’t decide what to play, couldn’t even make his fingers move properly to find a few chords and stumble upon an idea of what made sense, and he knew it wasn’t just because they were cold. He was scared. Scared, but also sure, in a peculiar, distant way. Finally, he dug in and tore through a ragged version of a ballad called “Wrestling with Aphrodite.”
A couple of cars went by. No one stopped. He was getting colder by the minute and by the end of the song, the fear had gone down to a murmur. He took a pen from his pocket, and scribbled on the back of the night's set list: FOR JIM. He put the note in the pick compartment, laid the guitar back in the case and snapped it shut. He would leave it on the bridge for someone to find. There was a luggage tag on the case, so if whoever found it didn’t just steal it, maybe it would be connected to him when his body washed up.
He felt a pang of regret about leaving the guitar on the bridge in the freezing cold for God only knew how long, snow piling up on it. It was a Gibson, and he knew that if the guitar ended up in Jim’s care, like he wanted it to, his friend didn’t have the money to repair a warped neck.
But that guitar still had a few more Billy Moon songs in it because of what happened next.
* * *
He stood there on the edge watching the snow spiral down into the icy black water. He reminded himself of the likelihood that if he left this bridge with his feet on the ground, he would end up as assistant manager of the pharmacy where he worked as a stock boy—overweight, using his store discount to keep a small arsenal of foot-care products in the medicine cabinet of his crappy apartment, and taking his acoustic out of the closet once a year to play it when he’s drunk enough. He stepped out with one combat boot pointing toward oblivion, as light splashed over the scuffed toe.
He couldn’t help it. He looked up at the oncoming car. The light moved too slowly. It was coming to a stop.
He heard a door open, but he couldn’t make out what kind of car it was or who just got out, not with the glare of the headlights in his eyes. Then he heard a voice coming from the light: a lazy melodious voice with a British accent. It spoke his name. He was trying to make sense of what he'd just heard, but his brain flat out rejected the idea that someone had called him by name—nobody in this city knew his name. That was why he was hanging off this bridge.
Certainly no one who drove a car knew his name. All his friends rode the T. The idea it was his boss flitted through his mind, but not with an accent like that. Is someone from work fucking with me? Had it been his boss, it would have only strengthened his resolve to throw his weight forward and end it. Only that felt wrong, too, because he had been interrupted.
Playing his encore and putting the guitar to bed in its plush velvet case felt right. It kept him in his suicide trance. But he couldn’t have the last thing he ever heard be his boss offering to give him a lift, in his best Nigel Tufnel impersonation. The suicide trance felt a lot like his songwriting trance, but the perfect rhyme he could feel forming on the dark periphery of his short life turned out to be a clunker that he just couldn't bring himself to end the third verse with. It was all wrong.
The man called Billy’s name again. It must be a cop who tracked me down for something, but I haven’t done anything, he thought. There was something deeply unsettling in the taunting singsong quality of the voice and as was the way he was so exposed in the headlights, like being on stage where everyone looking at you is a faceless silhouette beyond those blinding, hot aluminum cans. How could someone feel threatened by anything when in the act of offing himself? But he did.
He stepped toward the car to put a girder between his face and the light and could see a black limousine with a driver in a cap. One of the back doors was open, allowing a pool of red light to spill out onto the road like a fever. The man behind the seductive voice stood at the edge of that pool of sickly scarlet aura, grinning at him, wearing a tan suit, no tie, and sporting slicked-back black hair. Scruffy, in a rich sort of way, like a musician. Or a drug dealer.
That almost makes sense. He wondered, Who did I fuck over? Did the band sell some pot on this guy’s turf and now he’s going to make an example of me? And the fear threw his petty vanity into stark relief.
The snowflakes blowing across his face in the high wind started to melt a little faster on his flushed skin. He understood in that moment that even though he would have gone through with it, his suicide wouldn’t have been motivated by pure despair and self-loathing. It would have been his last shot at infamy in the absence of fame. Now the prospect of getting whacked by a drug lord and making the papers as a dim-witted, small-time pot peddler scared the hell out of him. It was a pitiful fifteen minutes. Jumping from the bridge, a guitar left behind, would have put a stamp of authenticity on his death. Suffering Artist: Exhibit A.
Billy approached the car, and the stranger smiled. He swept his hand toward the soft red interior in a grand theatrical gesture ending in a slight bow.
Billy found his voice, hoarse and ragged. “How do you know my name?”
“I’m a fan. Good show tonight. I can tell you weren’t at your best, but I have a knack for spotting potential.”
“You were at the bar? I didn’t see you.”
“I saw you.”
“Who are you?”
“Trevor Rail. I’m a producer. Grab your guitar. Let’s take a drive.”
Five
The air inside the limousine was redolent of rich leather and fine tobacco. A red lava lamp on a low table betw
een the backseat, where Billy sat rubbing his cold hands together, and the rear-facing seat where Trevor Rail settled in was the only source of light in the cabin. It must have been on for a while, because the lava was surging and writhing as if trying to break free of the glass. Rail cracked a window, withdrew a slim metal case adorned with elaborate scrollwork from his inner breast pocket, and offered Billy a cigarillo. Billy shook his head. Rail took one for himself and lit it with a silver Zippo, also engraved, possibly depicting a rooster with snakes for legs, but Billy only caught a glimpse.
The producer didn’t say anything for the first few drags, just sat there, appraising Billy wreathed in scarlet-tinged smoke. Billy had the feeling the guy was taking inventory of his assets. Tallying points for cheekbones, subtracting for the understated chin, adding a few for hair. Of Trevor Rail's own features, Billy could see now how handsome he was: slightly hooded lambent blue eyes coming across as a disquieting shade of pale here in the lurid light of the cabin, salt and pepper goatee tapered to sharp sideburns, teeth that would have been white as alabaster in clear light, here taking on the appearance of scintillating rubies when at last the man smiled and asked, “Do you write most of the material?” There was a hunger in the question.
Looking at those teeth, Billy felt that his hands might never be warm again, but he found his voice and said, “Some. All of the lyrics, some of the music.” He shifted in the luxurious seat and cast his gaze down at the guitar case resting at his feet. “Jim’s good at connecting parts and coming up with arrangements.”
“How about that one, ‘I Like to Watch.’ You write that?”
“Yeah. That’s one of mine.”
“First piece of valuable advice: dump them.”
“Huh?”
“Your mates. Dump them.”
“Why?”
“Because you won’t need them where you’re going.”
The Devil of Echo Lake Page 5
