We had reached the beginning of the Boardwalk—stove-in arcades (except for Joyland, which was kept up and ran off the same generator as the dancehall) and fallen-down rides and wrecked miniature golf courses with Spanish bayonets sprouting from their rotted carpeting—when a shadow heaved up from the deeper shadow of the crumbling sea wall and called to us. Mason Bird. A loutish, pudgy kid, whom I didn’t like one bit. His family had wanted to arrange a marriage between him and Darcy, and he had convinced himself that Darcy was marrying me against her will, doing it to please her parents and in reality pining away for him. He came shambling over, a sappy grin splitting his round face, and tried to make eye contact with her. “If you’re goin’ to the show tonight,” he said, “you better have a fortune in your pocket.”
“We’re just walkin’,” I said stiffly.
“Gonnabe quite a show,” said Mason, his eyes glued to Darcy’s chest. “This ol’ gypsy girl was tellin’ me ’bout it.”
“Oh?” said Darcy, and I frowned at her: Mason didn’t need any encouragement.
“Yeah,” said Mason. “Seems they was pokin’ ’round in New York City two, three years ago, and they found themselves an android. That’s kinda like a man. Got blood and organs and all, but no personality. No mental stuff.”
“Bullshit!” I said.
Mason acted as if he hadn’t heard. “But them ol’ scientists had a way of stickin’ real people’s memories inside its head, and they give it the memories of this famous musician. Fella named Roy John Harlow. Plays up a storm, I hear.”
I took Darcy’s arm. “So long, Mason,” I said. We started walking, but he fell into step beside us.
“Reckon I’ll wander along and see if there ain’t some stray honey who wants to go,” he said. “Me and Pa sold us a load of dried shrimp, and I got money to burn.”
It occurred to me that Mason must have guessed we’d be coming down the beach and—knowing I never had any money—had staked himself out by the sea wall in hopes of persuading Darcy to ditch me. I was furious, and Darcy must have sensed it, because she squeezed my arm and gave me a look that seemed to be asking me to spare Mason’s feelings. I clammed up, but it put me in a sulk; I could see how the night would go, with me and Darcy trying to slip away and Mason dogging our every move.
About a hundred feet further along, we ran into a group of people on the beach in front of the Joyland Arcade, and one of them—old man Rickerd, locks of his gray hair whipping like flames in the breeze—was shouting that we should stop the gypsies from bringing this evil into our midst. “Might as well feed your kids poison!” he said. “Know what they used to call rock ’n’ roll? The Devil’s music!” From where I was standing, the neon word JOYLAND was spelled out in an arc above his head, adding an incongruous caption to his evangelic witnessing, and inside the arcade, dark figures were hunched over the games: it looked strange, that one brightly lit place among all the shadowy ruin. “Roy John Harlow!” sneered Rickerd. “It’s got a man’s name, but you can’t fool a fool for Christ! That’s the Devil in there, sure as I’m born!”
Some people argued against Rickerd, but the majority were in agreement. That struck me as funny, because, while most of the adults in Daytona would say that the world was better off than it had been before the Winnowing, you could tell they didn’t really believe it; the stories their grandparents had told had made them long for things they’d never seen, and their attitude was, in part, sour grapes. As for us kids, we had too much distance from the Winnowing, and we were merely curious about the past, not haunted by it. The argument heated up, and though everybody there knew that nothing was going to come of it, judging by all the yelling and fist-shaking, you’d have sworn that a lynch mob was forming. Mason chipped in his two-cents’-worth, no doubt trying to impress Darcy with his intellect; since he was the only kid involved in the argument, he soon became its central focus and was drawn into the middle of the group. Seizing the opportunity, Darcy and I sprinted off toward the pier, holding hands and laughing at our slick escape.
It was high tide, which was the only time you could manage the swim; when the tide was going out, there was a fierce undertow and you’d have to be an idiot to risk it. We let a wave carry us close to the pilings, grabbed a cross-piece, swung up, and before long we were crawling under the railing at the rear of the dancehall: a big two-story affair with peeling yellow paint. The music had already begun—shards of searing melody mixed in with the rush of wind and surf—and it was the music as much as my wetness that caused me to shiver. I pulled on my pants and caught a glimpse of Darcy shrugging into her dress. In the moonlight she looked like a woman of copper, and the sight of her small pointy breasts made me shiver even more. We cracked the storeroom window. Inside, the planking of the walls and floor was black and bubbled with creosote, shined to ebony by the glare of a dangling light bulb. Cobwebs spanned between a number of old packing crates, and next to the door that led to the stage was a coffinlike box of gray metal. You could hear the music fine. We clambered through the window and settled behind one of the crates, where nobody would see us. I put my arm around Darcy, and she snuggled close, enveloping me in her clean, briny scent. After that we just listened.
I wish I could say the things that music said to me, I wish I could write down the notes into words. Sometimes it sounded like metal animals having a fight (I imagined a cloud of dust with lightning jabbing out the sides), and other times it was eerie and full of spaces, with a gravelly voice floating between the guitar passages. But no matter what the mode, it maintained a grumbling bottom, and most of all it was loud. The loudness got inside you, jumped along your nerves and made you arch your back and throw back your head. Maybe Rickerd was right and it was the Devil’s music, because while there were several instruments playing, it had the feel of a single fiery voice howling from a pit, the voice of a spirit, angry and despairing. Yet for all its anger and despair and loudness, it was still beautiful. Not a mental, thoughtful beauty, a beauty that’s easy to recognize, but a beauty of muscle and blood and violent emotion. And I wondered if that might not be what the Devil really was: that kind of beauty misunderstood.
The crowd responded to each song with sparse applause. I pictured them ringing the stage, my friends and their parents dressed in threadbare hand-me-downs, applauding less for the music than for the diversion—a bit of glittering life caught in the dull nets of our lives—and confused by this monstrous noise and the odd creature who had produced it. Then Roy John Harlow would introduce the next song, saying once, “Here’s a little tune I wrote ’bout a hunnerd ’n forty years ago,” and giving a sarcastic laugh. Embodied in the laugh was the same powerful despair that moved in the music, and the longer he played, the more dominant that despair became. Finally, following an extended silence during which the crowd muttered and rustled, Roy John Harlow said, “I wanna do one more for you. Somethin’ I finished a few days ago. It’s probably gonna be the last tune I write, ’cause it says all I gotta say ’bout the way things are nowadays.” The song had no music but was accompanied by echoing doubled handclaps that he inserted at the ends of lines and—now and again—in the middles. Though as with the other songs, many of the words were unfamiliar, there was no mistaking its meaning: he was evoking our common sadness, making us feel what we had tried not to for so long.
“Once I had a lady, she moved like a river and looked like an
angel in red,
And I knew a guy name of Gordon, he could always sell you
somethin’ good for your head.
There used to be a joint down on the corner where you could
grab a beer or two . . .
And sometimes I’d catch a jet plane to Paris and go dancin’
on the Cote d’Azure . . .
Dancin’ on the Cote d’Azure
“Once there were Cadillacs . . . Cadillacs!
Once there were space shots and astronauts,
Bluejeans and silver screens,
Diamond rings and dyin’
kings with computer hearts.
Once there was everything you wanted and too much to
choose,
And once I felt like fallin’ in love . . .
Once I felt like fallin’ in love.”
Most of the song was like that: lists of names and things and places that—as I’ve said—were foreign to me. Looking at them now, I can’t understand why they affected me so much; but at the time they seemed emblematic of something rare and alluring, and when Roy John Harlow sang the chorus, I’d feel an awful tightness in my chest and would have to lower my head and close my eyes.
“Hey, hey, baby! It feels so wrong!
Ain’t no sense in keepin’ on, keepin’ on . . .
My head starts achin’ when I think about it’s all gone,
And how my heart breaks when I sing this song . . .
How my heart breaks when I sing this song.”
There was hardly any applause afterward, and it wasn’t more than a second or two later that the storeroom door creaked open and footsteps scraped on the planking. Darcy and I kept dead still. We hadn’t expected the performance to conclude so abruptly, and we had believed we’d have time to climb out the window.
“Don’t put me back in there, man,” said a, gravelly voice. “Lemme sit up tonight.”
“I don’t know,” said a deeper voice. “I got . . . ”
“C’mon, man! You gotta gimme some life once in a while. Just cuff me and lemme sit.”
“All right,” said the deep voice. “But I’m postin’ a guard out front. Don’t you think ’bout goin’ nowhere.”
“Where am I gonna go in this goddamn world?” said Roy John Harlow.
I heard a metallic snick.
“You wanna smoke?” asked the deep voice, and Roy John Harlow said, “Yeah.” Then the door banged shut.
Until that moment I’d thought of him as a man, imagining him to be similar to the run of Daytona men—burly, bearded, tanned—only dressed fancier. But now I wondered what fearsome thing might be waiting on the other side of the crate. From beyond the door came a thump, voices fading and then sheared away by a second thump, and I realized that the gypsies had closed the dancehall. Soon they’d be shutting down the generator. I didn’t want to be trapped in the dark with an unknown quantity, and so—screwing up my courage—I had a peek at Roy John’ Harlow.
He was sitting on the gray metal box, his wrist cuffed to its handle, smoking a crookedy cigar and staring at the wall. In only one particular had my image of him been correct: he was wearing red leather trousers and a white silk shirt. His black hair had been molded into a pompadour that had more-or-less the shape of a rooster’s comb, with a curl hanging down over his forehead. He was thin, and his long-jawed, hollowed face had an evil handsomeness; it was a face better suited to a sneer than a smile. Then he turned to me, stared straight at me, and I saw that instead of normal irises and pupils, the whites of his eyes were figured by two black hearts. I had the idea that—like the cherries and lemons on the windows of the slot machines in the Joyland Arcade—those hearts could be whirled away and other symbols would roll up in their place. Two spades, maybe, or two roses. He didn’t seem surprised by my being there, just puffed his cigar and blew smoke. The fact that he didn’t react eased my fears, and I understood how perfectly his appearance fitted his music. To my mind rock ’n’ roll and Roy John Harlow were one and the same. He was the personification of that spirit-voice singing out from the flames of hell, and I guess that’s the way he perceived himself: a lost soul trapped in a world that was the ashes of a fuller, brighter place.
“What’s happenin’?” he said at last.
Darcy, who hadn’t yet seen him, dug her nails into my arm. I stood, feeling innocent and foolish. “Nothin’,” I said.
“You got that right,” said Roy John Harlow. He jetted smoke from his nostrils and held up his manacled hand. “Don’t s’pose you got a key?”
The handcuffs were rusty, frail-looking, and it would have been no trouble to pick the lock with my Swiss Army knife. But I was leery about doing it. Though he had—except for the eyes—the presence of a man, I couldn’t escape the notion that he was property. And, too, even if I let him loose, the gypsies would hunt him down. They were a persevering bunch when it came to holding onto something they considered theirs, and nobody with Roy John Harlow’s eyes would be able to hide from them. Then they’d be after me for having helped him. “No,” I said.
Darcy stood, and he gave her the once over. “How’d you get in?” he asked. I told him about the swim, the window, and he said, “You better swim on back. They might change their minds ’bout lettin’ me sit.”
“Can’t do nothin’ ’til the tide turns.” I explained about the undertow. “It’ll drag you clear ’cross to Africa,” I said.
“Africa,” he said. “That’s a helluva name for it.”
I didn’t understand what he meant.
“Why they keep you in that box?” asked Darcy.
He shifted his eyes toward her; the light struck full into them, and I saw that those heart-shaped pupils had narrow red borders around them, giving them the look of demonic valentines. “There’s needles in the side that inject me with shit,” he said. “Knock me out. They wake me up when they need me.” He let out a dispirited laugh. “Parceled out like that, you could live ten thousand years in this fuckin’ wasteland.”
“World might be different in ten thousand years,” said Darcy.
Again he laughed—it seemed that downhearted laughter was his reaction to most everything. “It’d just be worse,” he said. “You shoulda seen where I come from. Machine sex, separate governments for different age groups, joykillers. That’s why I let ’em do this to me. I was an old man, and I wanted to outlive that craziness. So when these guys come to me and say, ‘Roy John, we wanna record you and preserve your vast experience,’ it appealed to me, y’know? It was as close as I was gonna get to seein’ the glorious future, and I was enough of a pervert to think these goddamn eyes were cool. Well, I got my wish, man, in a kinda shadowy way. I seen the glorious future. The world I grew up in wasn’t much, but it sure as hell beat the world I was old in. And this world . . . shit!” He was silent for a bit, and I could hear the wind sighing, the tide sucking at the pilings below. “Tell me ’bout the Winnowing,” he said finally. “No one seems to know nothin’ ’bout it.”
“Nobody does,” I said.
“My pa told me that the earth passed through a comet’s tail,” said Darcy. “And most everybody just keeled over.”
“Some folk’ll tell you it was a kinda poison gas,” I said. “And some’ll tell you it was Jesus weedin’ out the sinners. Government up in Atlanta’s s’posed to know for sure.”
“Why don’t you ask ’em?” He glanced back and forth between us. “Don’t you wanna know? Ain’t you curious ’bout why six billion people died?”
“Government’s just a buncha’ crazies with a computer,” said Darcy. “We don’t like to have much to do with ’em.”
He stared at us as if we were something pitiful, and that made me defensive. “Besides,” I said, “the Winnowing was terrible, it’s true. But now we got clean air and water, and plenty of room. Most people think it’s an improvement.”
“Yeah?” he said. “Then how come I just had five hundred of those people lookin’ at me like dogs at a steak?”
I shrugged, having no answer, and after a moment Darcy asked, “How’d you get all those guitars and drums goin’ at once?”
“Computer programs.” He stubbed out his cigar and laid it on the metal box.
“It was really great music,” said Darcy. I thought he was going to say something, but he merely shook his head, amused, and leaned back against the wall. Darcy wasn’t to be put off, however. “It was so strong,” she said. “I never heard nothin’ that strong.”
“You woulda loved it, wouldn’t you?” he said nastily. “Little cooze like you, shakin’ her butt, dyin’ to go down on some asshole like me
, who could make it thunder when he plucked a string.”
If anybody else had talked to her in that tone, Darcy would have responded in kind; but all she did was flush and shift closer to me.
“Rock ’n’ roll wasn’t shit,” said Roy John Harlow. “The music was okay, but music was ’bout two percent of it. Most of it was copin’ with the stooges in your band, makin’ sure they’d show up on time and be straight enough to play. Dealin’ with brain-dead roadies and crooked promoters and crowds so stoned they couldn’t unzip their flies.” He laughed. “I remember one night I got to the bottom of all that.”
The lights flickered and went out. For a moment the storeroom was pitch-dark, but then a red glow began to shine from Roy John Harlow’s eyes. The heart-shaped borders around his pupils were blazing neon-bright, illuminating his cheekbones. It was an uncanny thing to see, and I took Darcy’s hand.
“We were playin’ a party in a VFW hall,” said Roy John Harlow. “ ’Bout a thousand people, wasted on beer and smoke and pills. Kids splashin’ in puddles of spilled beer, barfin’ in the shadows. One girl was dancin’ in front of me, her eyes rolled back in her head, makin’ these clawin’ gestures at me. Weird! We were opening for a band called Mr. Right. They thought they were hot shit, but we could kick their butt and we were doin’ it that night. Halfway through our set, this bearded guy with his arm in a cast crawls up onto the stage and while I’m singin’ he starts unpluggin’ my mike. I push him off with my foot and keep singin’, but he tries to unplug me again. I push him off again, and that’s how we finish the song, with this crazy dude goin’ for the plug and me kickin’ at him. After it’s over I jump down and grab him and say, ‘What the hell you think you doin?’ And he says, ‘Mr. Right wants to come on now,’ and tries for the mike plug. I haul him back and say, ‘Fuck Mr. Right!’ I got the picture, you see. The dude’s one of Mr. Right’s roadies and they’ve told him to cut us off ’cause we’re makin’ ’em look bad. The rest of the band crowds around, and we tell the dude he better be cool or he’s gonna wind up with somethin’ else in a cast. But he won’t listen. Later I found out they’d threatened to fire him if he didn’t get rid of us. The next thing here’s this fat son of a bitch waddlin’ through the crowd. Mr. Right’s manager. And he starts spoutin’ off ’bout us bein’ reasonable, compromisin’. One of my roadies leans in. His pupils are the size of train tunnels, and he’s grinnin’ like a maniac. ‘Lemme handle him, Roy,’ he says. ’Fore I can say anything, he hooks the manager in the gut and sets him down. Then all hell breaks loose. Here comes Mr. Right. Five guys wearin’ glitter and swingin’ mike stands and shit. A regular fuckin’ Battle of the Bands. Somebody clips me on the forehead, and I go down for the count. When I wake up, it’s all over and I guess we musta won ’cause my band’s on stage, fillin’ in with instrumentals.”
Rock On Page 47
