Roy John Harlow closed his eyes, and the room went dark for several seconds. “After my head stops hurtin’ enough so’s I can stand, I head to the bathroom. There was blood on my face, and I wanted to wash it off. Inside the bathroom, it’s even more of a hellhole than the hall. ’Bout an inch of piss and beer on the floor, garbage floatin’ in it, and buzzin’ fluorescent lights that are blindin’ me. Sittin’ in one of the stalls with her dress hiked up ’round her hips is this teenage girl, who’s passed out. She’s kinda pretty, but her mascara’s run and her lipstick’s smeared. Makes her look warped. I check out my head in the mirror. Nothin’ serious, but blood is coverin’ half my face and I’m thinkin’, ‘Here I’ve been beatin’ my brains out in the business for seven goddamn years, and this is what it’s come to—standin’ in a bathroom, bleedin’, wasted, and my audience passed out on the toilet.’
“I don’t wanna go back out. I just lean against the sink and read the graffiti, which tells me what fun it is to be a lesbian and that Jesus sucks and how some cooze wants to lay everybody in my band. Reading it, I decide I’ve had it. Time for a new profession. ’Bout then, in walks two teenage boys. ‘Hey!’ says one. ‘Terrific fight, man!’ Then he notices the girl. He leans over to look at her, makes his hand into a pistol and shoots her ’tween the legs. ‘Bang,’ he says. The other kid starts gigglin’. ‘Hey!’ says the first kid. ‘You wanna ball her, man?’ And I tell him, ‘No thanks.’ He staggers over and says, ‘C’mon, man! She won’t mind. Big rock ’n’ roll star like you. She won’t even look at us, but she’d be fuckin’ grateful to you.’ I tell him to leave me the fuck alone, and he goes back over to his buddy. They hang out for a while, crackin’ jokes ’bout the girl. It was weird, watchin’ ’em in the mirror. Reminded me of those cartoons where Daffy Duck or somebody’s got good and evil in a cloud over their head, tryin’ to convince ’em what path to follow. Finally they’re ready to go, and the first kid says, ‘Hey, man! You guys got a really great sound.’ He sticks his fist up in the air. ‘Rock ’n’ roll!’ he says. ‘Rock ’n’ roll!’ ”
Roy John Harlow scratched a match on the metal box and relit his cigar; the coal wasn’t as bright as his eyes. “The kid was right,” he said. “That goddamn bathroom . . . that was rock ’n’ roll.”
“Why didn’t you quit?” I asked.
“Two weeks later I landed a record contract. I thought maybe bein’ on top would be different. But it was the same shit, only dressed up in money.” He chuckled. “Maybe you’re right ’bout this world bein’ better off than mine. Maybe I just can’t accept it.” He waved his cigar at the window. “Open that up. Let’s see what it’s doin’ outside.”
I did what he wanted. A chute of moonlight spilled into the room; the surf of low tide was a seething hiss. Roy John Harlow lifted his head, as if he’d scented something new and strange. “Pretty night,” he said, and then, with a touch of desperation in his voice, he added, “Jesus God! I wish I was out in it!”
Darcy nudged me; she knew about my Swiss Army knife.
“You couldn’t get nowhere,” I said. “Those gypsies, they can track an ant through jungle.”
“He could head south,” said Darcy, fixing me with a disapproving stare. “The Indians might take him in.”
“He’d never make it,” I wanted to let him go, but I was still afraid of what the gypsies would do.
“Where I’d go,” said Roy John Harlow, “couldn’t nobody track me.”
“Where’s that?” I asked.
“Africa.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
He studied me, and I had trouble meeting his eyes. “You know how to get me outta here, don’t you?” he said; he yanked at the handcuff. “Damn it! Help me!”
I couldn’t say anything.
“You know what it’s like for me?” he said. “I feel wrong. Outta place. I’m not even sure what the fuck I am, but I’m sure I’m not Roy John Harlow. His ghost, maybe, or his shadow. That makes me crazy, sick at heart. I spend most of my time in this box”—he rapped it—and once in a while those bastards wake me, stand me up in front of a buncha raggedy fuckers so I can play ’em a blast from the past. That makes me even sicker, seein’ how puny and screwed-up everything’s gotten. It’s been like that for three years. Livin’ on stage, and dyin’ after each show.” His voice dropped to an urgent whisper. “I don’t want it anymore, man! You gotta way to turn me loose, do it!”
“Let him go,” said Darcy.
I looked at her, alarmed. “Darcy!” I said. “I think he’s gonna kill himself.”
Her face grave, she was watching Roy John Harlow, who was half-illuminated by the moonlight, appearing part shadow, part real. “Let him go,” she repeated. “It’s his right.”
“Maybe so,” I said angrily. “But his right don’t include my havin’ to help him.” That, I realized, was bothering me as much as my fear of the gypsies. The thought of helping someone die, even someone not quite alive or alive in a peculiar way, didn’t sit well with me.
“You think this ain’t death?” Roy John Harlow kicked the box. “And this?” He gave the handcuff a savage jerk. “And these”—he pointed to his eyes—“you think that’s life? C’mon, man! Lemme loose.”
How he said that last part reminded me of him asking the gypsy to let him sit instead of returning to the box. I was doing the same as the gypsy, acting like the landlord of his soul . . . if he had one. And at the moment I couldn’t believe that he didn’t. “All right,” I said, and kneeled beside him. I held his wrist to keep it steady while I worked on the lock. His flesh was warm, his pulse strong . . . so warm and strong that I was repelled again by the idea of his killing himself, and I stopped.
“Please,” said Darcy, touching my shoulder. “It’s like with Tony. Remember?”
Tony had been her pet cat, and after some kids had tortured it, leaving it half-crushed and spitting blood, I’d put it out of its misery. I wasn’t sure that Roy John Harlow was a sick critter who needed death, but Darcy had a sensitivity to people that I didn’t and I bowed to her judgment. I went back to work, and before long the cuff sprang open.
The glowing valentines of Roy John Harlow’s eyes seemed brighter, as if registering an intensified emotion. He rubbed his wrist where the cuff had bitten into it. Then he got to his feet, boosted himself onto the window ledge and sat with one leg in, one out. Then he eased the other leg out and walked away. We climbed through the window after him. He was leaning on the railing, gazing toward Africa. Clouds were fraying across the moon, and the sea had a dull shine all over, like a plain of polished jet.
“I thought it’d be easier,” he said.
“Maybe Darcy’s right ’bout the Indians,” I said. “We could . . . ”
He cut me off. “Make it easy for me,” he said to Darcy. “C’mere a minute.”
She looked beautiful, walking toward him, with her long hair tangling in the breeze, the fine bones of her face sharp under the moonlight, and I felt a pang of jealousy. But though I knew scarcely anything in those days, I understood that whatever was to happen between them was a compassionate formality, that it existed in a separate context from what was between her and me, and I held myself in check. They stood close together. He ran a finger along the curve of her cheek, lifted a strand of her hair. “Jesus,” he said. “Back when I was in style, they didn’t make ’em like you anymore.” He nuzzled her cheek, kissed it, then kissed her mouth. She started to put her arms around him, but he pushed her, gently away. “Not too much,” he said. “Too much and I’ll wanna do more than remember.” He sat down on the edge of the pier, grasping the lowest rung of the railing, dangling his legs off the side. Darcy moved away from him and took a stand beside me. He remained motionless for a long time, so long that I thought he must have changed his mind. I could feel my heart slugging in my chest, tension crawling along my nerves, and I wanted to run over and haul him back. At last he turned to us, his face pale and set, and I wondered what he was seeing: was it li
fe, the good things that even the most meager of lives can hold, or was it just two ragged kids with the dark ruin of the Boardwalk and a darker world behind? Then, so quickly that it was hard to believe he’d ever been there, he slipped beneath the railing and was gone.
Though in the years to come I was to think of his suicide as simply that—a man drowning himself, a sorrowful occurrence but nothing momentous—at the time he seemed a fabulous presence, and I half-expected a sign of his passing to appear in the sky or some great moan to be dredged up from the sea. But there was only the wind and the surf as always, and neither Darcy nor I went to the edge to see if he had surfaced. We sat in the lee of the dancehall, sheltering from the wind, which had suddenly picked up. We didn’t talk much, just things like, “You warm enough?” and such. The longer I sat, the worse I felt. Roy John Harlow had wanted death, had acted of his own will, but who was to say he had known what was best, and hadn’t I—by helping him—exerted as much influence as I might have if I had refused? The ripples of his death spread through my thoughts, magnifying them, until the event took on a complexity and importance that wouldn’t fit inside my head, and I was left numb and hollow-feeling. Soon the sky began to pink, crimson streaks fanned across the horizon, and the tide turned. We climbed down the pilings and jumped into the cold water; we caught a comber and body-surfed toward shore, barreling straight for the facade of the Joyland Arcade, with its sun-bleached image of a goofy clown melting up from the gray light. I scraped my knee on the coquina-shell bottom and was almost grateful for the pain.
We stood on the beach, dazed, not knowing what to do next. Going home didn’t make any sense after the night we’d had. Darcy fingered the zipper of the waterproof bag; she pulled it open, then she dropped the bag and started to cry. I hugged her, trying to give her comfort; but the comforting soon evolved into a kiss, and I was cupping her breast, and she was grinding her hips against me. Pa had told me not to hope for too much my first time with Darcy, that our nervousness and inexperience might make it more problematic than pleasurable; but our need for each other was so powerful that our anxieties were washed away, and it was perfect between us. And afterward, lying with my arms around her, our bodies crusted with sand, I felt that I had gotten clear of whatever wrongness there had been, that our lovemaking had been a spell worked contrary to the intricate sadness of the night. I was entranced by the sight of Darcy’s body, which though I’d seen it often, had acquired a heightened gloss, a freshly matured beauty.
Sunrise flamed higher, a towering city of clouds pierced by sharply defined rays and mounted against a banded backdrop of mauve and crimson and gold. It was such a vivid, burning sky, it didn’t seem that anything as old and ordinary as day would follow, that those colors would only deepen and grow richer, and for a moment I think I believed that the day would not follow, that with the death of Roy John Harlow and his music, something had been freed, some last smoke of the gone world faded, some change come full, and what passed for day would from now on and forever be something else, something new and green and hopeful, with its own music to suit. Maybe I was wrong, but it didn’t matter. I turned again to Darcy, and—as the sun began to warm my back and seagulls mewed, wheeling above the ancient pier and the dancehall, looking dilapidated in that brimstone light—I moved with her in a sweet hectic celebration of what we had lost, and what we loved, and what we did not understand.
Lucius Shepard earned his living as a rock musician in and around Detroit for almost a decade. Stories like this are informed by his journey through the outlying precincts of the music business, a time he now views as a kind of affliction. His fiction has been awarded many honors including the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards. Forthcoming is a new collection, Five Autobiographies, and a novel, The End of Life as We Know It.
The Big Flash
Norman Spinrad
T minus 200 days . . . and counting . . .
They came on freaky for my taste—but that’s the name of the game: freaky means a draw in the rock business. And if the Mandala was going to survive in LA, competing with a network-owned joint like The American Dream, I’d just have to hold my nose and out-freak the opposition. So after I had dug the Four Horsemen for about an hour, I took them into my office to talk turkey.
I sat down behind my Salvation Army desk (the Mandala is the world’s most expensive shoestring operation) and the Horsemen sat down on the bridge chairs sequentially, establishing the group’s pecking order.
First the head honcho, lead guitar and singer, Stony Clarke—blond shoulder-length hair, eyes like something in a morgue when he took off his steel-rimmed shades, a reputation as a heavy acid-head and the look of a speed-freak behind it. Then Hair, the drummer, dressed like a Hell’s Angel, swastikas and all, a junkie, with fanatic eyes that were a little too close together, making me wonder whether he wore swastikas because he grooved behind the Angel thing or made like an Angel because it let him groove behind the swastika in public. Number three was a cat who called himself Super Spade and wasn’t kidding—he wore earrings, natural hair, a Stokely Carmichael sweatshirt, and on a thong around his neck a shrunken head that had been whitened with liquid shoe polish. He was the utility infielder: sitar, bass, organ, flute, whatever. Number four, who called himself Mr. Jones, was about the creepiest cat I had ever seen in a rock group, and that is saying something. He was their visuals, synthesizer, and electronics man. He was at least forty, wore Early Hippy clothes that looked like they had been made by Sy Devore, and was rumored to be some kind of Rand Corporation dropout. There’s no business like show business.
“Okay, boys,” I said, “you’re strange, but you’re my kind of strange. Where you worked before?”
“We ain’t, baby,” Clarke said. “We’re the New Thing. I’ve been dealing crystal and acid in the Haight. Hair was drummer for some plastic group in New York. The Super Spade claims it’s the reincarnation of Bird and it don’t pay to argue. Mr. Jones, he don’t talk too much. Maybe he’s a Martian. We just started putting our thing together.”
One thing about this business, the groups that don’t have square managers, you can get cheap. They talk too much.
“Groovy,” I said. “I’m happy to give you guys your start. Nobody knows you, but I think you got something going. So I’ll take a chance and give you a week’s booking. One a.m. to closing, which is two, Tuesday through Sunday, four hundred a week.”
“Are you Jewish?” asked Hair.
“What?”
“Cool it,” Clarke ordered. Hair cooled it. “What it means,” Clarke told me, “is that four hundred sounds like pretty light bread.”
“We don’t sign if there’s an option clause,” Mr. Jones said.
“The Jones-thing has a good point,” Clarke said. “We do the first week for four hundred, but after that it’s a whole new scene, dig?”
I didn’t feature that. If they hit it big, I could end up not being able to afford them. But on the other hand $400 was light bread, and I needed a cheap closing act pretty bad.
“Okay,” I said. “But a verbal agreement that I get first crack at you when you finish the gig.”
“Word of honor,” said Stony Clarke.
That’s this business—the word of honor of an ex-dealer and speed-freak.
T minus 199 days . . . and counting . . .
Being unconcerned with ends, the military mind can be easily manipulated, easily controlled, and easily confused. Ends are defined as those goals set by civilian authority. Ends are the conceded province of civilians; means are the province of the military, whose duty it is to achieve the ends set for it by the most advantageous application of the means at its command.
Thus the confusion over the war in Asia among my uniformed clients at the Pentagon. The end has been duly set: eradication of the guerrillas. But the civilians have overstepped their bounds and meddled in means. The Generals regard this as unfair, a breach of contract, as it were. The Generals (or the faction among them most inclined to paranoia) are
beginning to see the conduct of the war, the political limitation on means, as a ploy of the civilians for performing a putsch against their time-honored prerogatives.
Rock On Page 48
