“That’s great,” Garris said, sounding like Tony the Tiger.
“You got a first name?”
“C-h-i-c, pronounced chick, and no jokes, please.”
“Right. Well, Chic, what does this mess come to?” They stacked the records and tapes on the counter next to the ever-ready register, which sat there humming. Lucas noticed an X-shaped wooden dump loaded with rolled-up posters, racked like skinny wine bottles. “Got any good shots of Stannard in there?”
Garris withdrew a white cylinder. “Your standard-issue wet-dream pose.” He unreeled it for appraisal.
Gabriel Stannard was frozen amid defocused, saturated primary colors and bleary circles of diffused spotlights. He was in focus, they were not. His mike glinted a mean chromium. One fist was up-thrust in a power salute. He was wearing the glittering golden vest on his otherwise naked, sweat-sheened chest. Perhaps he had a whole closetful of them to toss out to the hungry faithful. He was not looking at the camera…and by extension, his dead poster image could not be aware of who evaluated it.
“I’ll take that, too,” said Lucas.
“You can just rent the videos, if you want. Buying them outright can get expensive. Dupe it at home.”
“No, I’ll buy ’em. There’re deductible, you know.”
“Oh, right, for the article. In that case, I’ll give you an itemized receipt. Two hundred and sixty-three seventy-two, with tax.”
When Lucas peeled off cash, Garris’ eyes bugged only a little bit.
“You said Jackson Knox is touring right now?” Lucas said as Garris recounted the money. “I’d really like to catch him.”
“He does clubs now. Strictly under-two hundred capacity. Unless it’s local, I wouldn’t know about him; he’s kinda small league. There’s a copy of Realer Dealer in that stack over there; it’ll have the club lineups for all of May, and if it’s not in there, you’ll find it in The Rag or the weekend section of the Chronicle.”
Lucas paged through the pseudo-underground tab-bid. Undergrounds, born of the 1960s and rebellion, had been co-opted. The Freep was dead, dead, dead. Now the “alternative press” wore suits and ties and used credit cards. News wise, they were an alternative to nothing, except perhaps boredom at some bus stop. He turned to a section headed “Hot Dates” and scanned for Knox’s name. He was not disappointed.
The ROCKHOUND—formerly the Black Cat Bone, this recently refurbished club showcases quality small acts on weekends and local talent on weekdays. Full bar, 21 & over, upstairs lounge, dance floor, sandwich and munchie menu. Table seating for 100. Cover charge on weekends. 5/12: Bates Motel; 5/13: punk night; 5/14 Slim Slick & His Slick Dicks plus Urban Wreckage; 5/15: Yuppie Chow; 5/16-17: Jackson Knox & Friends; 5/18: The Hangovers. (415) 747-4414 after noon daily.
Lucas began to dig out change for the paper, but Garris waved his hand at it. “No charge. You’ve bought enough to warrant a ton of freebies in any decent rock shop. Which, by the way, is why I threw in Overkill for free, too.”
Lucas slid the tabloid into the On the Brink bag, one of those sturdy brown jobs with handles and an imprinted logo on both faces. “Thanks again. You don’t know how much help you’ve been, and I’m grateful.”
“My pleasure.” Garris beamed, looking for all the world like this year’s big winner of the Nice Guy Award. His shitty morning had been handily reversed. He stood there, rocking back and forth on his heels, his hands thrust into his pockets, his hair drooping into his eyes. “I’ll watch for the article. The Gallery version, I mean.”
When Lucas walked out of On the Brink with his purchases, Jackson Knox’s date at the Rockhound was five days away.
6
Nobody wanted to fuck with a semi. Those who dared, thought Gunther Lubin, were flirting with superior trouble.
Red lights and traffic, therefore, became even less than annoyances. Backing the truck up the narrow alley inlet behind the Rockhound had proven too much picayune hassle, so Gunther had floored it in reverse, gracing an asshole Honda Civic with a door ding as penance for parking too far from the curb. He barreled the top-heavy truck around the block and through an intersection without watching the traffic lights. Horns howled. Tires striped the pavement. Gunther spat out the wooden match he had been chewing and pulled his rig into the alley from the opposite end. The wing mirrors cleared phone poles by about an inch on each side as he skinnied the truck in skillfully. Once he made it, crawling out through the cab window was no biggie. Halfway out, he snatched his roadie pass, still on its waxed-paper backing to preserve the stickum, from the clip on the pilot-side visor.
The label was color-coded for Friday and read ROCKHOUND—CREW. There was a stamped and code-numbered bit of intrigue beneath that, a cryptic okay from Rockhound management. Gunther slapped the pass onto the crotch of his jeans. He was expected, but early. He had debated stopping for lunch before unloading Jackson Knox’s gear, but prime among the endorsements for Gunther as a primo roadie was his unflinching sense of self-sacrifice. The show must go on and on. About anything peripheral, Gunther really didn’t give a gilded shit.
He dropped the lift gate, and the chain latches clinked. Musical footlockers and cases were padded and stacked and backed up to the inner edge of the door track. Nobody could pack a truck like Gunther Lubin.
He turned to press the red button that would summon the Rockhound’s munchkins to open the back door and get the lifting started. But his finger never made it. The sudden, flat jolt of pain felt as though a lead meteor had bulleted down from deep space to crash-land right behind his left ear. Maybe it had homed in on his silver skull earring.
Lightning jumped whitely across his vision, and he went completely numb. Dirty pavement rushed to fill up his view. He felt no sensation of falling except air on his eyeballs; did not hear the sound of his body colliding with the chuckholed alley surface. He could see abrasions on the palms of his hands. He could see the blood. He thought, Bushwhack…goddamn…must’ve snuck under the truck ouch, before his sight blanked out.
He expected to feel his wallet being pulled, and he did. He had been sapped, expertly, and could not depend on what he thought he felt in any case. He thought he felt the wallet being replaced. Hallucination, he thought. Strong hands crimped under his armpits and hoisted him. His legs lolled uselessly as he was dragged. Gunther Lubin, boss roadie, had just faded to black.
He thought he felt the all-important stage pass being peeled from his pants.
“All right, all right, goddamn it to hell, I’m coming, I’m coming already! Jesus!”
Ralph “Sandjock” Trope hurried to the loading platform door wearing his irritated-executive face and sucking on a Turns. He had just taken twenty milligrams of Valium to come down off the coke, and his mouth tasted like an armadillo had taken a dump in it. His face was intended to intimidate underlings out of his path. Lifters and swampers could be satiated with free tickets. If a return favor was of sufficient magnitude, Ralph granted special dispensation to sneak backstage and gamble for the chance to mate with a female backup singer or hump a thumbs-down groupie. But roadies, like the asshole trying to buzz himself through the dock door by osmosis or some goddamn thing…god! They were always surly toward Ralph. They never called him “Sandjock.” To them, he was just a promotional underling, in no way connected with the almighty music, and to be held in that brand of sneering contempt that reminded Ralph that there were some clubs he could not join, period. And roadies could only be bribed with drugs. Expensive drugs, which were an executive hassle. So much harder to bury in the budget.
He cranked over the locking levers and rolled the door up on its counterbalanced rails. The roadie waiting outside was a dusty dude encamped behind three days of beard stubble, a leather eye patch with a rhinestone in the center, a battered cowboy hat, and an unfiltered Camel.
Ralph asked the dude if he was Gunther Lubin and felt stupid at once.
The cowboy sucked slowly on his smoke, wearied, and cocked a thumb at the ROCKHOUND—CREW stick
er pasted to his roughout jacket. His eyes—eye, rather—never left Ralph’s.
“Just show me where you want it.” His voice was a whiskey growl tinged with traces of an Atlanta accent. As he spoke, cigarette smoke puffed into Ralph’s face. It tortured Ralph’s deviated septum.
“Follow me,” Ralph croaked. Daylight was doing horrible things to his eyes, and he wanted to escape.
The roadie ambled back to the tailgate and pulled out a steel-reinforced tour locker, with KNOX BOX stenciled on the side in white spray paint. “If I’m gonna follow you, ace, somebody by-damn better be watchdogging this truck. Unless you wanna pay for what might walk off by itself.”
Ralph put his expression of executive pique on hold. He yelled into the depths of the theater, and Aabel, a sandy-haired gofer wearing an AC/DC tour shirt, burst dutifully forth to await orders, so eager to do something that he was almost jogging in place. Ralph thought of a hunting dog waiting for the order to fetch. “Tell Jimbo and Ferrett we’re offloading and to keep an eye on the truck.”
Aabel fetched.
Keep an eye on it. That was rich, thought Ralph. The road-burnout cowboy only had one eye to spare.
Once the bucket brigade of rock and roll ordnance commenced, Ralph phased back to the more important tasks of terrorizing the bartenders and hired help. And the cowboy…well, the cowboy could just go jerk off into his eyehole. He watched the man sling the footlocker up with a practiced air of robotic boredom. Then he pushed past Ralph without comment and strode down the corridor. Amid the junk dangling from the cowboy’s belt was the usual biker’s wallet, linked by chain to a mountaineer’s snap ring. There was a big lock-back knife in a scuffed leather sheath, a thousand-weight of jangling keys, and a teardrop-shaped sap with a handle of braided cowhide. Another rock ‘n’ roll soldier, Ralph thought with distaste. Another dude who got off on being a mean motherfucker. The lead shot in that sap could powder your brains and send them flying out your nose—wap!
The thought of nose powder made him wince.
When the roadie came back, Ralph said, “Hey —when does the great man and his band show up?”
The cowboy swiveled slowly, considering Ralph as though contemplating a cockroach on a doughnut. “Jackson always shows up one hour before the sound check. One hour. Always. The sound check is always two hours prior to the first show. Always. You, therefore, have a while to wait, ace.”
Jackson. Now Ralph was starting to fray. Jesus, this guy is on first-name terms with the son of a bitch. And it means nothing to him. Ralph’s anger, of course, was veiled envy. He knew it. And it made him angrier.
He spun with a sigh and left the whole scene to his inferiors. In half an hour that fair-looking lady reporter from L.A. Weekly would be awaiting an audience in his cramped office upstairs, and already Ralph was putting her through Penthouse pet poses in his brain. He wanted to appear firmly in control when he met her. He snorted some more coke off the edge of his hand. It tickled the backs of his eyeballs.
Later, when the police were grilling him, all Ralph would remember about the cowboy roadie were the southern-fried accent and the eyepatch.
“Are you Jackson Knox?”
Knox straightened and evaluated the man asking the question. He said nothing because, as the Rockhound’s headliner, he felt it should be obvious to the unwashed masses just who the hell he was. This better not be an autograph hound, not before the show could be talked about.
The man had a few years on Knox. The beige-tan color of his hair reminded the guitarist of an attack-trained German shepherd he had once owned. He’d dumped it. Too much trouble to babysit a dog.
“You’ve been looking for Gunther?”
That lit Knox up. He’d been cursing Gunther Lubin’s lineage for half an hour, wondering just where his number-one roadie had gotten to. He assumed Gunther was in the kip with some twelve-year-old; the roadie was known to prefer women small enough to revolve on the end of his cock.
Knox’s gaze fell on the Rockhound sticker on the man’s bush jacket. He sniffed and looked around the stage where the instruments had been set up.
“I’m Mason Kellogg,” the man said, extending a hand. “I’m staff here.”
Knox shrugged. On tour, all staff in all the clubs looked exactly alike. This guy was more behind than most. The bush jacket, the styled mop of hair.
“Gunther had some problems with the truck. Cops cited him or something. He phoned five minutes ago to say he’s on his way in. That’s all I know, but he said to tell you.”
Knox inspected the drum kit setup. It needed to be two feet farther back, to give him more gesturing room while he was wailing on his guitar. Dumb, for him to get accustomed to having clones do all the setups for him. He must not get spoiled. He must remember his roots, and the dog days spent slogging through shithouse clubs before Whip Hand had made a good impression on a scout from Atlantic. On the other hand, plugging male jacks into female sockets didn’t require a member of MENSA. Maybe his jumpiness was flop sweat, preconcert nerves. This was his comeback—his first California gig in two and a half years; what he hoped would be his triumphant comeback to the West Coast. More scouts would be in the audience tonight. Ralph “Sandjock” Trope had guaranteed it. Knox wanted to make a headline or two while he was in San Francisco.
“Thanks,” he mumbled. The staff dude in the bush jacket loped off into the maze of cable coils and spotlight racks that litter the offstage perimeter. You never could get to know them all. The faceless ones who did all the scut work so he could sleep late in the mornings, and abuse room service, and sign autographs, and make headlines.
Knox raked his stool toward the lip of the stage. Right in front of him, tilted upward, was his monitor speaker. Its purpose was to give him true tones through the din of performance. The monitor obliterated the ambient band noise and the bounceback from the rear theater wall. The other amps and speakers, plus two columns of speakers forming the P.A. system, were directed toward the audience. During his shows, his anchors had always been Gunther and the monitor. The monitor did not lie to him. Gunther lurked backstage, poised to spring forth in case Knox popped a string or needed a quick drink.
The foot switches for pedal effects were strapped to the stage by swatches of gaffer’s tape. There was an archaic, accelerator-style foot pedal for the fuzztone and wah-wah. It was even foot-shaped, like the gas pedal in a surfer’s Woody. It was Knox’s sentimental nod to earlier days, when the fuzz and wah-wah were the nastiest effects talkin’. The pedal had seen a lot of miles on the road. Next to it were the high-tech boxes for the flanger and the digital sampler. There was a microsynthesizer patched in as well, its twenty slide pots preset to Knox’s accustomed positions. In the background, the telltales on the amps winked green.
Knox laughed to himself and spread his fingers out before him, palm flat. No tremors; not yet. Cool down just a hair. Get ice. Get control.
Because of Gunther’s absence they were running half an hour behind on the sound check. Gregor, the bassist, was sprawled in a ringside seat, his feet up on the scuffed club table, pulling slowly on a beer. Comet, the drummer, was MIA, probably sniffing for nookie. Knox could see his rhythm man, Fudge, holding forth at the bar, watching the stage in the back-bar mirror. Knox picked up the gray coil of wire and knotted it around his shoulder strap. It was live and buzzed when his thumb touched the contact. They weren’t up to the status level of radio mikes and instruments. Knox liked feeling physically connected to his equipment. The knot on the strap was to keep the cord from yanking itself out if the wire was pulled during play. He plugged the silver jack into his agate-black Gibson and strummed a few wandering chords, warming up.
At the sound of his guitar everyone came to attention. The gofers stopped what they were doing to look up. Faces appeared behind the glass of the crow’s-nest, the sound booth of the Rockhound. Women were magically present.
He got a few friendly catcalls when he picked out “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree.” His E string was s
our, and he tuned it carefully. He’d do the same regimen for his two identical backup Gibsons in just a second. People were now paying attention. It was better than any drug.
Knox decided to rattle the rafters, just to wake everyone up and cut through the dense atmosphere of the Rockhound. He twisted the volume knobs on the Gibson to full and gave the strings a hard broadside. Give the people already waiting in line outside something to look forward to, he thought. The rich, evil croon of his axe filled up the chamber and drowned out everything else.
He slid through a nasty, fret-melting solo, then teased the guitar into a simple but impressive A-E-C riff. After one repetition he kicked in the wah-wah on the pedal board and began to twist the progression into a new shape.
Then his faithful monitor exploded—.
With a flashbulb pop of searing blue fire, the front of the monitor speaker disintegrated, blowing out steaming metal shrapnel that put three dozen large holes in Knox’s body even before it tumbled backward off the stool and hit the stage floor in death. Superamplified feedback screeched up and up, pegging everyone’s ears. The breakers blew and chopped off the sound. Knox was spread-eagled on the stage, wide eyes gaping at the empty space where the monitor had been. His mouth was locked open, speechless. Pieces of his beloved Gibson were sticking out of him. The last thing he saw was his picking hand, quivering spasmodically, spattered with his own blood. Then his eyes fogged and he was dead.
The prep man and other band members had hit the deck in panic. Now some of them conquered fright and jumped to smother the chunks of flaming wreckage that littered the stage. Aabel hurdled one of the P.A. columns, which was lying on its side. He had a fire extinguisher. Foul yellow fog blotted out the flames.
Ralph “Sandjock” Trope and the woman reporter from the L.A. Weekly ran out onto Ralph’s private office balcony, the vantage point that the Rockhound employees called the Spyhole. Ralph immediately broke for the stairs. The reporter fast-drew a Leica from her sling bag and began speed-snapping pictures on 400 ASA film as a crowd formed around Jackson Knox’s ravaged corpse. From the Spyhole, it looked as though someone had pushed the guitarist through a tree shredder. He was framed in a widening pool of blood. The people below milled around, stepping gingerly to avoid soiling their shoes.
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