Candlemas Eve

by Sackett, Jeffrey

  " 'We will be able to visit you very soon. We feel that we can help you eliminate the problems in your presentation of the faith, and by doing so we believe that we can spread the message of Satanism to an even greater number of people. We will see you soon after your New York City concert on the twenty-ninth.' " Schroeder looked up. "It's signed, 'Gwendolyn Jenkins and Adrienne Lupescu.' "

  "Well," Proctor said, "I guess I'll have to beat a hasty retreat after the show tonight."

  "Simon, I don't think they mean that they're coming to the concert. It sounds to me like they're gonna come to your house. That's why I brought you the letter. I figured you should know in advance."

  "Yeah, thanks," he said, yawning. "If they show up at my doorstep, I'll give 'em an autographed photo and send them on their way."

  "Good idea." Schroeder checked his wallet. "What did you say you wanted to eat?"

  He repeated, "Doesn't matter. Sandwich and a six-pack."

  "Okay," Schroeder said as he moved toward the door of the dressing room. "Just relax and take it easy. I'll be back soon."

  "Yeah, yeah," Proctor grumbled. "See you later." Schroeder left the room, closing the door behind him.

  Simon Proctor rose from the seat and walked slowly, heavily over to the sofa which rested against the far wall of the rather spacious dressing room. He fell backward onto it and threw his arm over his eyes. Might as well try to get a little rest, he thought. Got a two- or three-hour show to do-tonight. All that hopping around on stage, all that gyrating. Was a time I had to worry about my fingers holding out . . . used to get one hell of cramp in my left hand after a while, fretting that guitar, but it doesn't matter now. No problem. The bass, drums, lead, and keyboards are so loud and the music itself so deafening that no one can hear a simple old rhythm guitar anymore anyway.

  Rest, he told himself. Sleep for an hour.

  Five minutes passed before he hopped to his feet, annoyed at his inability to catch the few minutes of repose he felt he needed. Too keyed up, he thought. Too damned nervous. Too many pressures.

  He sat down once again in front of the dressing table and stared blankly at his own reflection in the mirror. The old face was still there somewhere, underneath the worry lines, somewhere in back of the troubled eyes, resting somewhere beneath the lined brow, hiding somewhere behind the world-weary, jaded expression which varied only when it expressed apathy or panic.

  Where did the years go? he thought. How the hell did I evolve into this ludicrous sideshow freak?

  It had seemed so simple back in the early sixties, back in his teens, lining up with his friends at the record store down in Hanover, waiting for the latest release from Buddy Holly or Chuck Berry. Even in the timeless, unchanging mountain town of Bradford, New Hampshire, it had been possible to find other teenagers with whom to struggle through the process of learning simple guitar chords, simple chord progressions—E to A to B7 to E, G to C to D7 to G, C to F to G7 to C, and so on and so on through the nights of his adolescence. When he and his friend Jimmy decided that the day after high school graduation they would head south for New York, it had seemed that the world lay at their feet, just waiting for their raw, untempered talents to sweep them to wealth and fame.

  Simon Proctor grinned, both happy with the memory and embarrassed at the presumption of his youth. Wealth and fame!

  He spent three years hustling gigs anywhere and everywhere he could, playing for tips and beer, sometimes just for tips, sometimes just to play. And no matter what the current idiom, he adapted to it and adopted it as his own. When all the radios were playing old standards, white mountain music, and white interpretations of old black ballads, that is what Proctor played. "Freight Train, Freight Train," and "Man of Constant Sorrow," and "Five Hundred Miles." And when Bob Dylan moved folk music into the realm of social conscience, Simon Proctor followed suit, striking his guitar in angry denunciations of injustice and inequality, calling out with heartfelt sincerity for peace and brotherhood, asking how many roads a man must walk down and warning that the times were a'changing. Then when the Beatles went serious and Dylan went electric, Proctor hooked up with a few other musicians who had been pursuing the fragile illusion of success, forming a crude rock band which they named the Pentagons for no particular reason. His old friend Jimmy drifted into the group and then drifted out of it again before settling down as an insurance salesman in New Rochelle.

  But things had gotten better after that. Gigs came their way more regularly, and Proctor had even begun to save some money, when the foolishness of competing egos caused the group to disintegrate, leaving Simon, now no longer a wide-eyed adolescent, once again hustling solo gigs in an increasingly quintet market.

  It was Harry Schroeder who had heard him one night in a roach-infested Brooklyn club and had decided that this young man was to be grist for his impresarial mill. He got Proctor together with a few other musicians whom he represented and, using his limited contacts, helped them establish a small but growing reputation as an acid rock band in the New York metropolitan area.

  It was around that time that he met Katharine, Proctor remembered. God, she was gorgeous! So much romance, so much love, so much intimacy, physical, emotional, spiritual, intellectual. So wonderful, until she took off one day with his bass player, leaving him filled with resentment and hurt, leaving him with Lucas, their six-month-old baby. Never did feel too fond of Lucas, he thought. Reminds me too much of his mother.

  It seemed that everything went wrong at once. With the bass player gone and Proctor in a state of almost permanent self-sedation, the other band members soon went their own ways. Harry sent him to a health farm in Pennsylvania to dry out and get the drugs out of his system, and then attempted to build him up as a solo artist, but this time one with a rock band to back him up. His talent was able once again to pull him through, and he made a nice living from performing—nothing opulent, but he was comfortable for the first time in many years. He even tried to rebuild the bridges he had burned years before between him and his father, Floyd, who still lived up in Bradford, retired on a civil-service pension. He spent an increasingly greater amount of time up at the old Proctor homestead, nestled in the mountains, leaving only when he had a concert tour or a recording session.

  It was again Harry Schroeder who had managed to secure the recording contract—or rather, contracts. With each successive record label Proctor had managed to pull together one hit album, followed by a flop, followed by an album so bad no one bought it, followed by a canceled contract, followed by another signing with another label where the process was repeated. It was not very long before Proctor realized that he just did not have it in him to produce hit after hit after hit. But by the time he reached his late thirties, fame had become increasingly less important to him, financial security increasingly more so.

  Especially since he had children to think about. It was before his first record was cut that he met Lucinda, a slightly plumpish but pleasingly round blonde with enormous blue eyes and sunshine in her smile. Their daughter Rowena was her mother's spitting image. When Lucinda died in that stupid, stupid traffic accident almost a decade ago, Simon Proctor had been so distraught that he even attempted suicide. It was his father Floyd who found him and rushed him to the hospital to have his stomach pumped.

  Lucinda, he thought sadly. If only you'd lived I would probably never have gotten myself mixed up in this insanity.

  The moment he met her something about her called to him as if he were being called home. She was so decidedly non-urban, no hint of pretense or sophistication, all purity and honesty and sweetness and practicality. Born and raised in Brooklyn, she nonetheless seemed hewn from New England oak. He took her to Bradford the weekend after they met, and married her the next week. Rowena was born the next year. And a few years after that, Lucinda was dead.

  Do parents really bequeath their personalities to their kids? Proctor wondered. Or is it just that I've raised Lucas and Rowena so differently?

  Lucas had been concei
ved on the road in the midst of the hurricane of music, drugs, booze, and sex which had formed the backdrop for his marriage to Katharine in that age of free love, free living, and free LSD. Lucas had grown up a scion of that age, typifying in himself everything negative in the heritage of the 1960s. But Rowena had never left Bradford, never been polluted by the degeneracy of the outside world. Simon Proctor had left the raising of Rowena to her grandfather Floyd. All he did was pay the bills, spend as much time with her as he could, and love her exceedingly. She was to him Lucinda incarnate, the image of her mother, and each time he saw her after a prolonged absence, each time she threw her arms around his neck, kissed him and called him "Daddy," he could barely restrain himself from weeping for love.

  And Lucas? More of a younger brother than a son, an aimless, purposeless hedonist. A product of the very culture Simon Proctor had helped to create, the very culture the churches and the schools had been condemning for so many years.

  Proctor shook his head to escape from his memories. He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a tobacco pouch. After pulling a thin square of rolling paper from the side compartment and pouring an appropriate amount of cleaned marijuana onto it, he proceeded to roll a perfect joint. One of my many skills, he thought. God knows I've rolled enough of them over the past quarter of a century.

  He struck a match and held it to the tip of the thin, intoxicating cigarette. It's funny, he thought as he drew the smoke deep into his lungs. If Lucas were here I'd offer him a toke. If Rowena were here, I wouldn't even have lit it.

  Maybe it was Rowena, in a weird and indirect way, who got me into this, he thought. It had not been long after her birth when first oblique, and then blatant, references to the Devil began to crop up in rock lyrics. Mick Jagger and the Stones had started it, almost innocently, and then other groups had begun openly to extol the virtues of the dark elements. Kinky sex and violence entered the rock world, and fortunes were being made from increasingly extreme efforts to outrage and offend.

  And Simon Proctor had followed the trend once again, as he had so many times before, but now not an innocent youth in search of fame, not a would-be John Lennon or a Bob Dylan-to-be, not a part of youth culture, not that wide-eyed kid who had hitchhiked from Bradford to Manhattan so many years ago. Now a grown man in his forties, with a twenty-year-old son and a sixteen-year-old daughter and an elderly father in failing health, a man with feelings of guilt over the son he had allowed to grow to young manhood as a bent and twisted bough, a man who wanted to give his baby, his lovely Rowena, everything she wanted, loving her all the more because she wanted so little; now a son who felt responsible for his ailing father, a son who paid the property tax and the fuel bills and the cost of repair and upkeep on the sprawling property in Bradford, New Hampshire; now a son who was beginning to see in the mirror, not the face of youth and opportunity and the future, but the watery eyes of his own father staring back at him from the reflection, a son knowing that it would someday be he, and not old Floyd, who would need care, care which he could never expect from Lucas, care which would be a burden he would never place upon Rowena's shoulders:

  Now a man who realized that he had better make money while he could, that he had better save and invest what he could, that rock and roll singers have no pension plans, that money needed to be made now, saved now, invested now:

  Now a cartoon figure who slopped his face with greasepaint and dressed like a monk onstage and sang of witchery and Satan and the black arts, because that's what the kids wanted, because that's what sold records, because that's what sold concert tickets:

  Now a self-proclaimed warlock who sold himself as the leader of a totally imaginary, nonexistent cult, a man who realized that the only thing which would distinguish him from a dozen other singers who exploited this witchcraft nonsense was his claim to authenticity, his public avowal of his descent from John Proctor, which was true, who had been hanged for witchcraft in Salem in 1692, which was true, who had indeed been a warlock, which was false, just as his remote descendant Simon was a warlock, which was false:

  Now a buffoon, sitting naked before the cameras while a pompous professor stripped away the mask to reveal, not the Phantom of the Opera, but Sammy Glick:

  Now a tired, worn-out performer at the end of his tenure in the public eye, with everything he owned, even the roof over his father's head, held hostage to a film which had been held up to public ridicule before it even hit the theaters.

  A man on the brink. A man on the edge.

  A man at the end.

  "Hiya, Simon," Harry Schroeder said cheerfully as he slammed the dressing room door and tossed a brown paper bag onto the dressing table. "Sorry I was so long, but I met Gladys Duff in the deli. You remember Gladys? Lead singer with the Eldorados?"

  Proctor started at the interruption and then gazed at Schroeder in surprise. "What time is it?"

  "Seven o'clock."

  Proctor shook his head. "Shit. I've been sitting here daydreaming for hours." He reached over and took the bag. "What did you get me?"

  "Ham and cheese on rye, mayo and mustard, and some beer. Okay?"

  Proctor unwrapped the sandwich and took a healthy bite from it. "Yeah, terrific,"' he muttered as he popped open a can of Schlitz. "So what's with Gladys? Was she eating in the deli?"

  "No, working there," Schroeder said as he heaved his bulk into a seat. "Her husband Sonny ran off with somebody or other, and the group fell apart." Schroeder paused for a moment and studied Proctor's face carefully. "You okay?"

  "Yeah, yeah, fine," he said, taking a swig from the beer can. "Just wish I could still play 'Be-bop-a-lula.’ "

  "Huh?"

  "Remember what one of the Beatles said, McCartney I think, or maybe Lennon? He said that when they started out they weren't looking to be multimillionaires or world-famous celebrities, or anything like that. He said they were just a bunch of kids who wanted to chase girls, drink beer, and play 'Be-bop-a-lula.' " Proctor sighed and took another drink. "That's how I'm feeling, Harry. I wish I could go back to when I just wanted to play 'Be-bop-a-lula.’ "

  Schroeder smiled sympathetically. "Regrets over passed youth and lost innocence, right?"

  "Yeah, something like that."

  "Well, join the club. If everybody who ever wanted to live his life over again had the chance to do it, there'd never have been a generation of people after the first one."

  Proctor laughed. "Harry, you're a philosopher!"

  Schroeder laughed in turn. "Yeah, I'm a philosopher like you're a witch."

  Proctor swallowed a bite of sandwich. "How are the box office sales? Any better?"

  "No," Schroeder replied, shaking his head, "still the same. But don't worry, we'll do okay. We'll see some profit tonight." He yawned. "Looks like snow outside."

  "In late October? It never snows in New York City in late October."

  "Yeah, I know, but it still looks it. Feels it, too. I got a wet chill in my bones."

  "Comes from not washing that suit since 1968." He finished the sandwich and threw the wrapping paper into the wastebasket. "It isn't going to snow." He gazed once again at his reflection in the mirror. "I look like shit," he muttered.

  "If it snows, a lot of people won't show up tonight," Schroeder said, not hearing him.

  "Get off it, will you?" Proctor snapped. "It won't snow." He studied his aging face more closely. And where, he wondered, are the snows of yesteryear?

  The house lights did not dim: they were instantaneously extinguished. The babble of excitement in the audience rose like a sudden wave and then dropped immediately into a silence pregnant with anticipatory glee.

  "DISCIPLES!" a voice boomed over the amplification system. "THE MASTER APPROACHES! ALL HAIL SIMON, BELOVED OF LUCIFER, PRINCE OF THE DARK POWERS!"

  Six explosions onstage filled the front of the concert hall with billows of white smoke, colored red and green and yellow by the flashing lights. Simon Proctor, warlock, emerged from one of the pillars of smoke, his white fa
ce gleaming in the spotlight, the flowing sleeves, train, and cowl of his black monk's robe fluttering in the wind generated by the offstage fan which also dissipated the smoke, revealing the band in similar attire.

  Proctor raised his arms in a gesture of salutation. "Hail Satan!" he cried.

  "Hail Satan!" ten thousand sixteen-year-olds boomed back with laughter and excitement.

  A girl in a tight black leotard strode onstage to a barrage of catcalls from the pimply Lotharios in the audience, and handed Proctor his guitar. He slung the strap over his shoulder and struck the opening chord to his song "Pathfinder." The band came in on cue, and the audience cheered to the sound of the familiar music. The cheering redoubled when Proctor began to sing the lyrics, and the spectators began to clap along with the rhythm.

  "Can't you hear that old north wind beating the sky,

  Beating the sky, beating the sky,

  With a grip in your gut and the fear in your eye,

  Waitin' on the Judgment Day.

  Wind gonna come, gonna blow out your light,

  Blow out your light, blow out your light,

  Find you a'dyin' on a cold winter night,

  And then it's gonna blow you away."

  The lead guitar riff screeched out of the amp between verses, tearing deafeningly through the eardrums of the audience, who cried out for more.

  "Near the sign by the crossroad, the Devil he smile,

  Devil he smile, Devil he smile,

  You been travelin' toward him for many a mile,

  Without even a soul to save.

  One road leads to your lover's room,

  Your lover's room, your lover's room,

  Other road leads to a cold, hollow tomb,

  Where Death's gonna dance on your grave."

  My God, what garbage! Proctor thought as the keyboards trilled shrilly into their showcase. He stood immobile as a statue during the first part of the show, leaving the bouncing about and gyrating for the second half. Just as well tonight, he thought as his hands moved mechanically through the chord progression: Am—G—F—Am, F—Am—E. Right now I couldn't muster up the energy to square dance.