Rock On

by Howard Waldrop

  Littlehampton in the middle of winter was windswept and bleak. The funfair was closed, the beach huts were closed, the Red Indian canoes were all tied together in the middle of the boating pond so that nobody could reach them. Fawn sand waved in flat horses’-tails across the promenade, and old lolly wrappers danced across the tufted sea grass.

  I spent hours walking around the town center looking for John Drummond, but that first afternoon I didn’t see anybody between the ages of three and sixty-five. It started to rain—a cold, persistent rain—so I rang the doorbell at one of the redbrick Edwardian villas close to the seafront and booked myself a room for the night.

  It wasn’t much of a place to stay, but it was warm. There was also fish and chips for supper in a small dining room I shared with two traveling salesmen, an unmarried mother with a snotty, wriggling boy in soiled dungarees, and a bristly-mustached retired colonel with leather arm-patches on his jacket and a habit of clearing his throat like a fusillade of gunshots.

  Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note, as his corpse to the ramparts we hurried.

  Next morning it was still raining, but I walked the silvery-gray streets all the same, looking for John Drummond. I found him totally by accident, in a pub on the corner of River Road, sitting in a corner with an untouched pint of McEwan’s and a half-eaten packet of salt-and-vinegar crisps. He was smoking incessantly and staring at nothing.

  He was thin, so much thinner than the last time I’d seen him, and his hair was graying and wild. He looked a bit like a geriatric Pete Townshend. He was dressed in tight black trousers and a huge black leather jacket with about fifty zippers and D-rings. He wore a lapel badge with a picture of three pairs of scampering legs on it and the motif “Running Men Tour 1986.”

  I parked my lager next to his and dragged up a chair. He didn’t even look at me.

  “John?” I said, without much confidence.

  His eyes flicked across at me, and narrowed.

  “John, it’s Charlie. Charlie Goode. Don’t you remember me?”

  “Charlie Goode?” he asked dully. Then, very slowly, as if recognition were penetrating his consciousness like a pebble falling into treacle, “Cha-a-arlie Goode! That’s right! Char-lie Goode! How are you keeping, man? I haven’t seen you since . . . when was the last time I saw you?”

  “Isle of Wight.”

  “So it was. Isle of Wight. Fuck me.”

  I lifted my beer and drank some and wiped my lips with the back of my hand. “I’ve been looking for you since yesterday,” I told him.

  He sucked at the butt of his cigarette, then crushed it out. He didn’t make any comment, didn’t even look as if he’d heard me.

  “I’m not really sure why,” I said, trying to sound light-hearted about it. “The thing is, Jimi asked me.”

  “Jimi asked you?”

  “It sounds stupid, doesn’t it?” I said with a forced laugh. “But I met him in Notting Hill. He’s still alive.”

  John took out another cigarette and lit it with a cheap plastic lighter. Now he wouldn’t take his eyes off me.

  I said, more seriously, “He was trying to get back into Monika’s old pad. He didn’t say why. The thing is, he found out that you lived there for a bit, after he—well, after he stopped being around. He said I had to find you. He said it was crucial. Don’t ask me why.”

  John blew out smoke. “You saw Jimi, and Jimi told you to find me?”

  “That’s right. I know it sounds stupid.”

  “No, Charlie, it doesn’t sound stupid.”

  I waited for him to say something else—to explain what was going on—but he wouldn’t, or couldn’t. He sat there and smoked and drank his beer and occasionally said, “Jimi asked you, fuck me.” Or else he sang a snatch from one of Jimi’s old songs.

  In the end, though, he drained his glass and stood up and said, “Come on, Charlie. You’d better see what this is all about.”

  Hunched, spindly-legged, he led me through the rain. We crossed River Road and into Arun Terrace, where a long road of small Victorian artisans’ cottages with slate roofs and majolica-tiled porches stood. The hedges smelled of cat pee, and wet cigarette packets were snared in the shrubbery. John pushed open the gate of number 17, “Caledonian,” and opened the front door with his own key. Inside, it was gloomy and crowded with knickknacks: a miniature ship’s wheel with a barometer in it, the plaster head of a grizzled Arab with a hawk on his shoulder, a huge ugly vase full of pink-dyed pampas grass.

  “My room’s upstairs,” he said, and led the way up a flight of impossibly steep stairs, covered in red sculptured carpet. We reached the landing and he opened the door to a small bed-sitting room—a plain, cold British bedroom with a candlewick bedspread and a varnished wardrobe and a Baby Bellingcooker. The only indication that this was the home of one of the best rock guitarists since Eric Clapton was a shiny black Fender Strat with finger marks all over it.

  John pulled over a ratty basketwork chair with a collapsed seat. “Make yourself at home,” he told me. Then he sat down himself on the end of the bed, and took out his cigarettes again.

  Cautiously, I sat down. I felt as if I were sitting down at the bottom of a dry well. I watched John light up again and testily smoke. He was growing more agitated by the minute, and I couldn’t figure out why.

  After a while, however, he started talking in a low, flat monotone. “Jimi was always talking about the time he used to tour with the Flames—years ago, before he got famous or anything, just after he left the Army Airborne. They played in some back-of-beyond town in Georgia somewhere, and Jimi got mixed up with this chick. I always remember what he said about her, ‘foxy to the bone.’ Anyway, he spent all night with her, even though he missed the tour bus, and even though this chick was married and kept telling him that her husband would beat her when she got home.

  “He told her he wanted to be famous, and she said, sure, you can be famous. At about four o’clock in the morning, she took him to see this weird old woman, and this weird old woman gave him a voodoo. She said so long as he fed this voodoo, he’d be fine, and famous all over the world, and every wish he ever wished would come true. But the day he stopped feeding that voodoo, that voodoo would take back everything, and he’d be shit, that’s all, just shit.

  “But Jimi wanted fame more than anything else. He could play good guitar, but he wanted to play brilliant guitar. He wanted to be so fucking brilliant that nobody would even believe that he came from earth.”

  “So what happened?” I asked. The rain pattered against the window like handful of currants.

  John blew smoke out of his nose and shrugged. “She gave him the voodoo and the rest is history. He played with the Isley Brothers, Little Richard, Curtis Knight. Then he was famous; then he was gone. Why do you think he wrote that song ‘Voodoo Chile’? He was a voodoo child, that’s all, and that was true.”

  “John, he’s still alive,” I insisted. “I saw him; I talked to him. I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

  But John shook his head. “He’s gone, Charlie. Twenty years gone. When he became famous, he started to starve that voodoo, but in retaliation the voodoo made him weak, made him crazy. Jimi wanted to play for an audience, but the voodoo made him play music that was way beyond anything that an ordinary audience could understand. It was beyond anything that even great guitarists could understand. You remember Robin Trower, from Procol Harum? He went to see Jimi in Berlin and said that he was amazing, but the audience was out of it. Robin was one of the greatest guitarists ever, but he was out of it. Jimi was playing guitar that nobody would understand for about a hundred fucking years.

  “So Jimi tried to get rid of the voodoo, but in the end the voodoo got rid of him. The voodoo canceled him out, man: If you don’t live with me, then you don’t live at all. But you don’t die, either. You’re nothing—you’re absolutely nothing. You’re a slave, and a servant, and that’s the way it’s going to be forever.”

  “Go on,” I whispered.

&n
bsp; “There was only one thing he could do, and that was to take the voodoo back to that little town in Georgia where he first got it. That meant leaving his grave in Seattle and bumming his way back to England, finding the voodoo, and taking it back, in person, to that weird old woman and making her a gift of it. Because if the person you’re giving it back to doesn’t accept it as a gift, it’s still yours, man. Still yours, forever.”

  I sat in that ridiculous chair with its collapsed bottom and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “What are you trying to tell me? That Jimi’s turned into some kind of zombie? Like the walking dead?”

  John smoked and looked away, didn’t even try to convince me.

  “I saw him,” I insisted. “I saw him, and he talked to me on the phone. Zombies don’t talk to you on the phone.”

  “Let me tell you something, man,” John told me. “Jimi was dead from the moment he accepted that voodoo. Same way I am.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You want me to show you?”

  I swallowed. “I don’t know. Maybe, yes. All right.”

  He stood up awkwardly. He took off his scruffy black coat and dropped it onto the bed. Then he crossed his arms and lifted up his T-shirt.

  He was white-skinned and skeletal, so thin that I could see his ribs and his arteries, and his heart beating under his skin. But it was his stomach that shocked me the most. Tied tightly to his abdomen with thin ropes of braided hair was a flattish ebony figure, very African in appearance, like a small monkey. It was decorated with feathers and diseased-looking fragments of dried pelt.

  Somehow, the monkey-figure had become part of John. It was impossible to tell where the figure ended and John began. His skin seemed to have grown around the ebony head and enclosed in a thin, translucent webbing the crooked ebony claws.

  John let me look at it for a while; then he dropped his T-shirt and covered it.

  “I found it under the floorboards in Monika’s hallway. It was all wrapped up in one of Jimi’s old shirts. I’m pretty sure that Monika didn’t know anything about it. I knew it was dangerous and weird, but I wanted the fame, man. I wanted the money. I thought that I could handle it, just like Jimi thought that he could handle it.

  “I wore it for a while, tied loose around my waist, under my shirt, and I fed it bits and pieces just like you’d feed a pet animal. In return, it kind of sang to me; it’s hard to describe unless you’ve experienced it. It sang to me, and all I had to do was play what it sang.

  “But then it wanted more. It clung tighter and tighter, and I needed it tighter because when it was tighter it sang such amazing music, and I got better and better. One morning I woke up and it had dug a hole in my skin, and kind of forced its mouth inside me. It was sore, but the music was even better. I didn’t even have to listen to it anymore, it was right inside me. I didn’t even have to feed it with scraps anymore, because whatever I ate, it sucked right out for itself.

  “It was only when it was taking stuff direct from my stomach that I realized what was really happening. And by that time, I was playing music that nobody could relate to. By that time, I was so far out that there was no coming back.”

  He paused, coughed. “Jimi took it off before it went into his gut. But he couldn’t play shit without it. It’s a need, man. It’s worse than any drug you’ve ever imagined in your whole life. He tried pills and booze and acid and everything, but until you’ve needed the voodoo, you don’t know the meaning of the word ‘need.’ ”

  “So what are you going to do?” I asked him.

  “Nothing. Go on living.”

  “Couldn’t you give it back to Jimi?”

  “What, and commit suicide? This thing’s part of me, man. You might just as well tear out my heart.”

  I sat with John talking about the 1960s until it began to grow dark. We talked about Bondy at the Brighton Aquarium, John Mayall, Chris Farlowe and Zoot Money at the All-Nighter in Wardour Street, where you could get bashed in the face just for looking at somebody else’s bird. We talked about sitting on Tooting Graveney Common on cold, sunny autumn afternoons listening to the Turtles on a Boots tranny. We talked about the Bo Street Runners and the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, the girls in the miniskirts and the white PVC boots. All gone, man. All vanished, like colorful, transparent ghosts. It had never occurred to us at the time that it could ever end.

  But one gray evening in 1970 I had walked down Chancery Lane and seen the Evening Standard banner “Jimi Hendrix Dead,” and they might just as well have announced that our youth had shut up shop.

  I left John just after eight o’clock. His room was so dark that I couldn’t see his face. The conversation ended and I left, that’s all. He didn’t even say good-bye.

  I walked back to the boardinghouse. As I stepped through the front door, the bristly-mustached colonel held up the heavy black telephone receiver and announced harshly, “It’s for you.”

  I thanked him, and he cleared his throat like a Bren-gun. “Charlie? It’s Jimi. Did you find him?”

  I hesitated. Then I said, “Yes. Yes, I did.”

  “He’s still alive?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes.”

  “Where is he, man? I have to know.”

  “I’m not sure that I ought to tell you.”

  “Charlie—did we used to be friends?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Charlie, you have to tell me where he is. You have to.”

  His voice sounded so panicky that I knew I had to tell him. I heard myself saying the address like a ventriloquist. I didn’t dare to think of what might happen if Jimi tried to get the voodoo back. Maybe I should have minded my own business, right from the very beginning. They always say that it’s dangerous to mess around with the dead. The dead have different needs from the living, different desires. The dead are more bloody desperate than we can even guess.

  I went round to John’s place the next morning after breakfast. I rang the doorbell, and a fussy old woman with a brindled cat on her shoulder let me in.

  “Nothing but trouble, you people,” she complained, hobbling away down the hall. “Nothing but noise. Nothing but loud music. Hooligans, the lot of you.”

  “Sorry,” I said, although I don’t think she heard me.

  I climbed the stairs to John’s room. Outside on the landing, I hesitated. I could hear John’s cassette player, and a tap running. I knocked, too softly for John to hear me. Then again, louder.

  There was no answer. Only the trickling of the tap and the cassette playing “Are You Experienced?”

  “John?” I called. “John, it’s Charlie!”

  I opened the door. I knew what had happened even before I could fully understand what I was looking at. Jimi had gotten there before me.

  John’s torso lay on his dark-soaked bedspread, torn wide open, so that his lungs and his stomach and his liver were spread around in brightly colored profusion, interconnected with webs of fat and torn-apart skin. His head was floating in the brimful washbasin, bobbing up and down with the flow of the water. Every now and then his right eye peeped at me accusingly over the china rim. His severed legs had been pushed bloodily beneath the bed.

  The voodoo was gone.

  I spent a week in Littlehampton “helping the police with their inquiries.” They knew I hadn’t done it, but they strongly suspected that I knew who had. What could I tell them—“Of course, officer! It was Jimi Hendrix!”? They’d have had me committed to one of those seaside mental homes in Eastbourne.

  I never heard from Jimi again. I don’t know how the dead travel the seas, but I know for a fact that they do. Those lonely figures standing by the rails of Icelandic-registered cargo ships, staring at the foamy wake. Those silent passengers on cross-country buses.

  Maybe he persuaded the old woman to take the voodoo back. Maybe he didn’t. But I’ve pinned the album cover of Are You Experienced? to my kitchen wall, and sometimes I look at it and like to think that Jimi’s at peace.

  Be
fore he became editor of Penthouse magazine and then a best-selling author of horror novels, thrillers and historical sagas, Graham Masterton edited the rock music page of his local newspaper in Sussex, England, and rubbed shoulders with many of the up-and-coming rock musicians of the mid-1960s, including Jimi Hendrix. Graham’s first horror novel The Manitou was filmed with Tony Curtis in the lead role. His latest horror epic is The Red Hotel, a zombie tale set in Baton Rouge. It will be followed by two major crime novels—White Bones and Broken Angels—set in Cork, Ireland, where he and his late wife Wiescka lived for four years.

  We See Things Differently

  Bruce Sterling

  This was the jahiliyah—the land of ignorance. This was America. The Great Satan, the Arsenal of Imperialism, the Bankroller of Zionism, the Bastion of Neo-Colonialism. The home of Hollywood and blonde sluts in black nylon. The land of rocket-equipped F-15s that slashed across God’s sky, in godless pride. The land of nuclear-powered global navies, with cannon that fired shells as large as cars.

  They have forgotten that they used to shoot us, shell us, insult us, and equip our enemies. They have no memory, the Americans, and no history. Wind sweeps through them, and the past vanishes. They are like dead leaves.

  I flew into Miami, on a winter afternoon. The jet banked over a tangle of empty highways, then a large dead section of the city—a ghetto perhaps. In our final approach we passed a coal-burning power plant, reflected in the canal. For a moment I mistook it for a mosque, its tall smokestacks slender as minarets. A Mosque for the American Dynamo.

  I had trouble with my cameras at customs. The customs officer was a grimy-looking American, white with hair the color of clay. He squinted at my passport. “That’s an awful lot of film, Mr. Cuttab,” he said.

  “Qutb,” I said, smiling. “Sayyid Qutb. Call me Charlie.”

  “Journalist, huh?” He looked unhappy. It seemed that I owed substantial import duties on my Japanese cameras, as well as my numerous rolls of Pakistani color film. He invited me into a small back office to discuss it. Money changed hands. I departed with my papers in order.