An Evening At Huffington's

by Thomas Dietzel

Part One

1.
The woman from the Rose City Weekly looked all of eighteen. She was sitting across the table from Thane Truman in a low-slung Lebanese restaurant called Ali’s, thumbing her way through a small stack of index cards covered with tiny cursive handwriting. Thane looked from her face to the cards and back to her face again and waited. That shirt…she had on a tight black T-shirt with the heads of the two spies from Mad magazine on them, the ones that looked like crows or something. She was taking her time with the cards so Thane drank in her expansive chest and marveled at how the convexity of her breasts bent the spies’ faces into Cubist abstractions. And her lips…they were anointed with some kind of lurid purple lipstick. If it wasn’t for the lipstick she could have passed for sixteen, easily. The word “woman” didn’t seem appropriate for her except in the context of a census or a voter registration form – she was a girl, a nymphet…

At last she finished whatever it was she was doing with the cards and put them on the table. She reached into the purse she had placed on the empty seat to Thane’s left and withdrew a thin salt and pepper notebook and a surprisingly sharp pencil. Thane eyed the pencil with curiosity.

“Everyone makes mistakes,” she said, and smiled. She raised the eraser end of the pencil and showed it to Thane – she was patronizing him, for sure, like he was a member of a rainforest tribe. He didn’t know how to respond to this so he nodded slowly and looked at her. What a smile this girl had! Wolflike! She looked like a wolf…and it wasn’t just the smile - her whole face was vaguely lupine. Her hair was pulled back in a secretarial bun and she had on a pair of those horn-rimmed 1950’s retro glasses that all the XX hotties in the Rose City wore these days. He wondered if she had a boyfriend, and if so, how attached she was to him. A lot of girls had boyfriends they were just holding onto until someone better came along. Someone like Thane Truman.

“So….,” she said in a voice that somehow managed to be playful and businesslike at the same time. “Are you ready for me to ask you some questions?”

Thane grinned at her. “Sure,” he said. Finally. “Only on deep background, though. Off the record.”

“Right,” she said, coquettishly. “An anonymous interview about Thane Truman. They’ll never guess it’s you.” She opened the salt and pepper notebook and picked up the card on top of the pile and glanced at it. “Is that your real name?” She looked over the rim of her glasses at him. “Just curious.”

He realized he’d forgotten what her name was – Cassie? Cassady? Well – he’d find out. “Yes, it is,” he said. “My father’s name, too.”

“Oh?” she said. “Two Thane Trumans, huh? Is he an artist as well?”

Artist. He loved that. Like he was a painter or something. “Well – he played the piano a little bit when he was a kid, but not anymore. Not for a career or anything.” He realized he’d said career a little too smugly. His father had a lucrative career as a limnologist. He was an expert on the Columbia River and was paid handsome sums to host seminars and give lectures at colleges and universities all over the Pacific Northwest. Thane Truman didn’t feel it was necessary to share this at this juncture, and the woman-child didn’t inquire further. Instead she said:

“So – obviously the reason for this interview is that you’ve got this CD coming out.” She glanced at the card she was holding and Thane realized it contained…facts! About – him! “Vector,” she said. “Is that right?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Don’t you have a copy of the press release with you?” he asked. Why the cards? Were they all about him?

“Somewhere,” she said airily. She reached into her purse again and withdrew something that looked like a 9-volt battery. It had a tiny digital display on it and a tinier rectangular hole on one side, presumably for a flash drive. She pressed a button on it and set it back down on the table. A tiny red light, like a baleful eye, had come on. “Okay,” she said. “Recording. I’m going to ask you a few questions, five or six, and then I’ll ask you if you have anything you want to add. Try not to be too lengthy in your responses. Keep it kind of short and basic.”

He was a little ruffled by this. Short and basic. “If things get long and complicated you can just edit it, right? Make it shorter and stuff?” He could feel the oratorical springs starting to bubble inside.

“I can,” she said. “But try anyway. Okay?” She smiled at him with what was presumably encouragement.

A thin, dark man appeared beside them with a tray. They sat in silence as he set down two glasses and filled them with ice water from a pitcher. He vanished as wordlessly as he had come. Thane wondered vaguely if it was racist to notice that the guy was dark – well, fuck, he was probably Lebanese, anyway.

“I told them we’d order when we were finished. Is that okay?” the girl asked. “I didn’t want to have to listen to a bunch of chewing.”

“That’s fine,” he said. He suddenly felt as though all of it - the girl, the checkered tablecloth, the glasses – was spinning around him at a tremendous speed. He had felt this before, but he didn’t have a name for it. It was as though everything was revolving around – him! The red light on the recorder looked like the planet Mars plowing through the night sky and the soft yellow lights overhead were distant star clusters, galaxies, all of it revolving, revolving… He had no way of knowing his was the sin of Claudius Ptolemy, in which a mere satellite is mistakenly elevated to the position of prime mover. The mere satellite was the ego of Thane Truman, presumed to be the prime mover of the musical spheres of the Rose City …and beyond!

“Okay,” the girl said. “Here we go. When did you, Thane Truman the Second, start playing music?” She smiled and looked at him with her wolf face and her purple lipstick.

And then Thane Truman started to talk about Thane Truman and all was bliss and light and wonder.

2.
“Look at this,” Crimson Clover said. He was sitting in an easy chair of faux purple velvet in Lisa Dennis’ crummy apartment on 41st Avenue, gazing out the narrow windows at the street two stories below. “Will you look at this motherfucking grayboy? Cracker jack!"

Lisa Dennis, who was arguably a cracker as well (certainly congenitally, and possibly by class, or lack of it), was not to be distracted. She was fixated on a small mountain of cocaine that rose from the glass table in front of her as she busily sliced and diced it with a rusty razor blade. Lisa had furtive porcine eyes that normally darted about as though she were looking for truffles. Currently, however, she was completely absorbed in the task before her, which she approached in an exquisitely compulsive manner, making each downward thrust of her razor blade at an angle of exactly 180 degrees to its predecessor. The Ottoman on which she was sitting tilted forward dangerously.

Crimson Clover snorted. He had an enormous bald head and wore pink heart-shaped earrings. The object of his attention was a person, presumably a man, judging from his hairy legs and thick ankles – it was hard to be sure, because whoever it was had a head that was completely occulted by an enormous blue laundry bin they was bearing on one shoulder as though they were traipsing across the savannah for the benefit of a photographer from National Geographic. One flexed bicep supported his load from below and another arm reached across and grasped the top of the bin. He looked, in fact, like the laundry basket was his head. This was too much for Crimson Clover, or CC, as his friends called him. “This motherfucker,” he mused, “looks like an African, walking like that.” CC would know – he was African, or African-American, at least, which was close enough. He was wearing a scarlet bathrobe cinched with a glittery, furry belt that looked like a glamorous stuffed animal – a caterpillar, perhaps. He had his legs coiled beneath him in a manner that spread the bottom of his robe apart like a pair of tent flaps, exposing a pair of leopard-thong underwear. Of course, neither he nor Lisa Dennis could care less about this revelation. CC was queerer than a thirteen-dollar bill.

“That grayboy needs to get himself a motherfucking Red Ryder, is what he needs,” he chortled, presumably to himself, since Lisa Dennis gave no outward indication she was receiving any sensory stimuli whatsoever apart from the sight of the illicit butte beaming onto her macula fovea and the feel of the of razor blade in her squat, chubby fingers. She was hypnotized.

CC shifted his legs beneath him and the tent flaps parted further. “You know what some fool at work asked me?” Work was a French dessert restaurant called Chez Marie, where he was a server. “This fool – he comes in all the time, right? – this fucking fool says to me, ‘Might I inquire as to your name?’” He snickered. “That’s what he said – ‘Might I inquire?’ So I tell him ‘CC,’ and he says, ‘CC, forgive me for asking this, but how come you don’t sound black when you talk? You are black, right?’ So I smile at him-” – and here CC rolled his lips back like a pair of horizontal curtains to reveal miles of teeth – “and I’m like, ‘’Scuse me, sir?’ And he goes, ‘It’s like you’re black, but not with a capital B, right?’ That killed me, yo. A capital B. So I tell him, ‘’Cause, I’m gay with a capital G.” His eyes get real big like this –” – CC retracts his eyelids into his skull so that his eyes bulged out like someone with Grave’s disease –“- and I keep going. ‘I’m queer with a capital Q, I tell him. A faggot with a capital F. How ‘bout it, sweetcakes?’” CC pronounced sweetcakes with an ostentatious lisp – thweetcaketh. “And then his eyes bug out even more, right? And he gets up and sort of bustles toward the register without looking at me. I freaked that grayboy the fuck out! Wooooooooooo!” With this CC raised a fist in the air and pumped it twice in a ironic version of the Black Power salute.

At this point a miniscule unpulverized chunk of the mountain went bouncing across the table and disappeared over its edge. “Fuck!” Lisa Dennis howled, and then there was the tinny sound of a staccato drum kit and a wavering synthesizer line. Lisa’s cellphone. She dropped to her knees, frantically scanning the hardwood floor for the rogue chunk. The ringtone chirped on, oblivious to this crisis.

“Want me to get that?” CC asked. He took her silence for assent and picked up the cell from the window sill. He glanced at the display and said, “It’s Casper.”

Lisa glanced up for a nanosecond from the floor but said nothing.

“Casper!” CC said, answering the phone. “My man! Yeah, yeah. Well, why’n’t’choo come on up, slim? Okay!” He hung up as Lisa, chunkless, reared herself up on her knees and stared at him. “Talkin’ Black!” he said by way of explanation.

“What the fuck!” she said. It was the first time she had spoken in the last twenty minutes. “What the fuck! He’s early! You think I’m doing this for my fucking HEALTH? I haven’t cut this shit yet! He’s fucking early!” In a panic she got on her feet, using the glass table for support, which tipped precipitously with her weight, and the mountain slid slightly to one side like an avalanche was in progress. She lumbered toward her cluttered desk and frantically rummaged around in the detritus on its surface before finding an envelope. CC watched all this with a detached amusement but said nothing. His lips were twisted to one side in an ironic smile. Then she turned back toward the table and began rapidly scooping great mounds of the tabled hillock into the envelope. She had done this three times when there was a knock at her door, or a series of knocks, really, a sequence of staccato triplets that invoked a horse galloping at a mighty speed.

“Lisa?” a timid voice said through the door.

“Fuck….” Lisa said, sotto voce, and then, loudly: “ONE SEC!” She scooped again, and again, and then folded the envelope in half and stuffed it in the pocket of her tight jeans. Then, panting, she lunged toward the door and flung it open. A diminutive figure wearing a black hoodie stood there uncertainly. A folded newspaper was tucked under one arm.

“Can I come in?” He looked past Lisa to CC on his fake velvet throne. CC’s eyes twinkled.

Lisa shrugged. “You’re fucking here,” she said in a monotone voice, like an android.

CC stood up, closing his tent flaps, and crossed the room, stepping on the following items along the way: a bottle of peach Nail’em nail polish, a crumpled napkin, an empty Baby Earthling CD case (cracking it), and a hideous red wool scarf, silhouetted with green Christmas trees. The floor was a benign minefield. As Casper meeked his way inside CC slapped him on a hoodied shoulder and said, “You look like you’re up to no good, my man Casper, no good.” He tsked tsked at him and shook his head. “But that’s all right, all right, all right.” Then he stood aside and Casper pressed on and spotted what remaining of a once mighty mountain on Lisa’s glass table. It was approximately half its former size, and it looked positively lopsided compared to its original symmetrical grandeur.

“Is this it?” Casper said, and leaned in closer, sniffing the air as though he were trying to scent out more. “That doesn’t look like two eight-balls to me,” he said. His hoodie was tiny on his slight frame - he looked like someone had painted most of a long twig black and stuck it in the ground like a flagpole.

Lisa crossed her pudgy arms in front of her and raised her shoulders in a kind of suspended shrug. “I fucked watched him measure it out myself. The shit is fucking gnarly. Be careful.”

He turned his head to look at her and then gazed back doubtfully at the shrunken mound before him. “Mmmm,” he said, in a vague way. He dropped his newspaper on the table next to his booby prize and soundlessly reached into his pocket, withdrawing a folded small stack of bills. “Three hundred,” he said. Now he sounded like an android.

Lisa wrinkled her nose. “It’s three-twenty,” she said. CC repressed a smirk.

“Three-twenty?” Shit, I only brought this,” he said, waving his money in the air: a little green flag of surrender. “Can I bring it to you next time?”

Lisa looked past him at nothing and particular and put her hands on her hips. “Maybe you, uh, kick me down a little, and we’ll call it fifty-fifty, even, right?” The folded envelope bulged conspicuously in the pocket of her jeans. She reached over and plucked the money from his hand. It reminded CC of someone picking the head off a dandelion.

Casper looked again at his tiny mountain. “Okaaayyyy,” he said, and bent over and picked up the razor. He went flick flick flick and dislodged a little iceberg of coke to one side. He glanced over at Lisa who stuck her eyebrows together crossly until they were fierce black moth wings.

“Don’t be such a Jew,” she said.

Casper went flick flick again and dropped the razor without looking at her. Do you have anything to put it in?” he said thinly.

CC reached into a pocket of his scarlet robe and took out a pack of Virginia Slims. With the other hand he pulled the sheath of cellophane off the pack and placed it upright on the glass table. It looked like a little transparent grocery bag. Then he scooped Casper’s snowjob into the bag with the razor, being careful to get every grain, every sliver, every lone particle of it neatly into the sack. He pinched the top closed and rolled it down over itself before picking it up and handing it to Casper. “Have love, will travel,” he said to him.

Casper held it up to his eyes and inspected it like a child who had just purchased a sickly goldfish. “Did you want some?” he said to CC, polite through slightly gritted teeth.

CC threw his head up and cackled. “Naw,” he said, and smiled.

“He’s allergic,” Lisa Dennis said.

“Allergic?” Casper said. “No shit.”

“Gives me hives,” CC said. “Up in my nostrils and shit. It’s very rare.”

Casper nodded with feigned sympathy. His eyes had the sullen emptiness of someone who knows they’ve just been had but is too impotent to do much about it. “Well, that’s probably best.”

“Bet your ass is it. You know, Casp,” CC said, “you know, when you do that shit a lot, you know what happens? Your heart changes fucking shape. It’s like – it’s like it remodels itself.”

Now Casper looked worried. “Wha’?” he said. “What shape?” Lisa went over to the easy chair and tossed herself down into it, the better to wait for her mark to scram, skedaddle, vamoose. She felt like the cocaine was going to burn through her pocket into her epidermis. It vibrated like a silent alarm.

“Well,” CC, said, his voice assuming an authorative, pedantic timbre, “you know how your heart normally is shaped like a fist, right?” Here he held up his Black Power fist again, this time for the benefit of enhancing his lecture. “Well, after you do that – that shit for a while, and you know, it pumps more blood, you like…” Here he opened and closed his fist illustratively. “Well, like it’s doing more work and shit, so it tries to become the kind of heart you want it to be. And it turns into like – like a cylinder, or something. It changes shape.” He reached over to the sill where Lisa’s cellphone had rested and he picked up an empty Olympia tallboy can by way of demonstrating what a cylinder looked like. These two teaching materials, the can and his fist, he held before him, the better for Casper to contemplate the consequences of his vice. “See the difference?”

“How do you know this shit?” Casper said. He placed one foot behind him as though he were about to bolt for the door.

“Well, Casp,” CC said, “My mom was a – see, she worked with people like that, blow addicts, crackheads. People like you.” Lisa gave him a look rife with pollution, as much for delaying this unwanted intrusion longer than necessary as well as propagandizing to a client of hers a message not overly helpful to her petty business enterprises (pronounced scams, or swindles).

“Yeah, I’ll keep them in mind.” He stood up straighter and said, “Thanks, Lisa.”

“Okay, okay,” Lisa said. “Just remember, I’m not a drug dealer, if anybody asks.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, dully. “You’re just the man in the middle.” If this man bit was a subtle insult or insinuation on the part of the mark, his eyes betrayed nothing. “See, ya, CC,” he said, and opened the door and strode out, his posture gone south with defeat.

They both waited about fifteen seconds before they said anything.

“He’s cute,” CC said. “Not the brightest knife in the box, or whatever, but his ass ain’t bad. Though it might need a little polishing.” He cast a lascivious leer toward the apartment door. He leaned against the wall near the bathroom and untied his caterpillar before cinching it tighter and retying it.

“What the fuck,” Lisa Dennis said, making it sound like a statement rather than a question. “Why do you have do be such a dipshit?”

CC said, “Honey, you know I was just born to dip my cock in that shit, or have something dip theirs in mine – I ain’t particular.” He winked at her.

She frowned and stood up, crossing over the window that looked down on the sidewalk below. Mr. Dirty Laundry Head had long since ambled on. “First of all, you told him you could come up here. I didn’t tell you to answer-”

CC cut in, defensively. “I asked you,” he said.

Lisa made a spitting sound. “I don’t care if you axed me,” she said, “’cause I don’t remember saying, ‘Yes, Crimson, my dear, please answer my phone. Also –” here she waved an admonitory finger at him as he began to interrupt again – “also, what the fuck was up that with that – that little lecture you felt compelled to give?”

“It’s true,” he said, defensively. He put his hands on his hips with the thumbs facing forward, like an interior decorator inspecting his handiwork. “It’s called remodeling.”

“I don’t give a fuck if it’s true or not,” she barked at him. “You scare the customers when you talk like that. Plus you make them stay longer than necessary.”

“Riiiiight,” he said. “You’re not a dealer but you still have customers. Riiiiiight.”

Her eyes spat little cinders at him and then she said. “I told you. I’m the middle man. I’m like a middle manager. All the bullshit, none of the perks. So fuck you.”

An ironically smiling CC picked up the paper that Casper had left behind and sat down in the easy chair again. Lisa walked coldly across the room and sat in a wooden rocking chair next to the front door. She leaned back until the chair went snick against the wall and she stayed that way, her feet bent and her calves flexed. She glowered at, or through, her betrayer, who nonchalantly flipped open Casper’s copy of the Rose City Weekly that he was now holding and proceeded to ignore her. Lisa Dennis sighed and brought her heels back to the floor and then, gripping the armrests of the rocking chair, went scooch scooch scooch until she was in front of the glass table again. She pulled the envelope out of her pocket and emptied her secret share on the table - it resembled a scale model of the original mound, about half as large as the original. The additional chunks she had tithed from her mark lay to one side. It was quite a take, in all. So what if that little fuck Casper never came back for more after it was so obvious she’d ripped him off? There were others.

“Heeeeeeyyyyy…..,” said CC, mostly to change the subject. “Guess who’s in here?”


“Who?” Lisa Dennis said. She was back at her slicing and dicing game with far less enthusiasm than she had exhibited previously. The razor went click click click click.

“Your old boyfriend,” CC said, and lifted the paper as he turned it around to show her. He pronounced boyfriend in a slightly perverse manner.

“Gimme that,” she said, dropping her razor, and reached over and took the paper from him. Her swinish orbs scanned the pages of the open Rose City Weekly. They widened and then narrowed in quick succession.

“Ain’t that him?” CC asked. He leaned forward slightly, a prosecutor cross-examining a witness, the better to hear what he already knows.

The Rose City Weekly was a specimen of a free weekly newspaper that has become a necessity in any American city that aspires to be numbered among the hip and urbane on Judgment Day. These newspapers are folded on the left rather than the top, so that they open like a book, and consist primarily of arts and entertainment news as well as a liberal smattering of local politics and gossip. Their income is derived solely from advertisers. Each issue carries a music feature about a local artist making good – this week, of course, in the RSW, it was…

“Thane Truman?” Lisa Dennis said. “My boyfriend? I don’t think so.” She skimmed the article. It was an interview. At first she could only focus on clumps or clusters of words but then whole sentence fragments wafted up to her retina like flaming ashes fluttering up from a campfire. For a few moments thoughts of cocaine vacated her mind.

…I consider this album to be a challenge to the music community, not only the music community of the Rose City, but of the world as well… want to show people that as musicians we are completely free to pursue our visions without regard for genre or the whims of the marketplace…the time has come for us artists to give themselves wholly over to their inspiration…I want to let people know that it’s okay to do that…I want this record to liberate people from fear of artistic expression…I think we are all artists, each one of us, all of us plugged into the holy battery of the universe…

“Did you read this shit?” Lisa Dennis asked. CC shook his head no.

…will be viewed in years to come with the same reverence as Sgt. Pepper or Kid A, as an historical catalyst for what came after…

“What a prick!” Lisa cried, the plosive causing the adipose tissue in her cheeks to quiver sympathetically. “Who the fuck does he think he is?”

“Who, your boyfriend?” CC asked innocently.

…the music is excellent because I’m excellent…

“He was never my boyfriend!” Lisa yelled. She looked volcanic. “We went out on a date about seven years ago when-” – she started to say when I was a hell of a lot thinner than I am now – “I was too young to know what an asshole he is!” She folded the weekly in eighths, like a roadmap, and chucked it to the floor, where it unfolded itself and lay there flatly like a dead thing. She shook her head.

CC picked up the weekly and examined it gingerly. “Well!” he said. “Do you want me to read you your horoscope instead?”

…excellent because I’m excellent…“No!” she said. She got up from the rocking chair and went over to the desk again, where she rooted about until she found what she was looking for, which was a narrow silver device slightly tapered at either end, like a torpedo. She walked back to the rocking chair and sat down in it.

“Now what?” CC said.

She picked up the razor and went scrape scrape scrape until there was a long thick line of coke before her. She put the torpedo in her left nostril, plugged the other one with an index finger, and leaned over the line and went Fffffffttttttttt and then there was only the white mound.

“He’s having a CD release show at Huffington’s,” CC said. He was reading the interview himself, now. “Wanna go?” Huffington’s was a gorgeous rock club close to downtown. It was the place to be, whether you were a musician or a fan. (Musicians were the new jocks. Everybody knew that.)

Lisa was sitting straight up in her chair. Her eyes watered slightly and she made a hk-hk-hk-hk sound in her throat. “Huffington’s?” she said. “Huffington’s? That’s very interesting, very interesting, very interesting, very interesting.”

CC looked at her. Her eyes seemed to be coated with varnish. “Why is that interesting?” he asked.

“You know,” Lisa Dennis said, as billions of synapses in her brain went WHAM WHAM WHAM, “I think I might like to go to that. I might like to go to that after all.”

“Hey,” CC said, raising a chin toward the window. “Here comes the laundry man.” The laundry man, if it was a man, was headed down the sidewalk in the opposite direction but with his load on the opposite shoulder so that his head was still eclipsed by the bin.

“Oh yeah,” said a new and improved Lisa Dennis, craning her neck to see the sidewalk through her narrow window. “I see what you mean.”

3.

Practicing with Thane Truman was trying under the best of circumstances, but now, two days after the new issue of the Rose City Weekly had come out, he was truly insufferable.

“Dax,” he was saying. “Dax, what was that?”

Dax, who wore a Fender Precision bass around his neck, looked at him over the rims of his oval frames. “What was what?” he said. He was gawky in a humorless sort of way. He was wearing a purple T-shirt that said, in bubble letters: Because I’m The Mommy, That’s Why!

Ivy, the drummer, let out a sigh and leaned back on her drum stool in a manner that said Oh boy, here we go. She was lithe and lovely but kept her head shaved to deter suitors. It seemed to be working on the male suitors; the females were as aggressive as ever.

“What you were playing,” Thane said. He stared at the bass as though it was complicit in what had happened. He too had a Fender around his neck – his was a cream-colored acoustic guitar. He looked like a young and patrician Robert Redford, which made people a lot more forgiving of his megalomania than he deserved. No, life is not fair – that which appears to be just is often merely accidental.

“I was playing what I always play,” said Dax. He wasn’t backing down.

They practiced in the basement of Ivy’s house. The basement was unfinished and there were cardboard boxes and heaps of clothes piled in the dim corners and against the concrete walls. It was illuminated by a single 200 watt bulb that was always too bright anyway. Now it seemed to polish their exchange to a high interrogatory sheen, like Thane was the bad cop about to bust the chops of one Dax Samuels, the debaser.

“Well, it sounded different,” Thane said. He put a hand to his temple like he was suffering an aneurysm. “Play what you just played.”

Dax stared at him but obliged and let loose with a barrage of ascending staccato thumps while Ivy rolled her eyes in accompaniment. The blinding bulb shook seismically.

“That’s what I’m talking about,” Thane said. “The third note – what was the third note you just played?”

“F,” Dax said blankly.

“Well, no wonder,” Thane said. The expression on his face was one of imminent triumph. “You can’t play an F underneath a fucking D major chord. This isn’t a blues band.”

If the fact that he was not in a blues band was a revelation to Dax, he managed to conceal his surprise. He crossed his arms over the neck of his bass and looked at Thane some more. “Uh-huh,” he said.

“Guys,” Thane said, “we’re not…we’re…” He closed his eyes as though hunting for le mot juste. “We have a vision to uphold,” he said finally.

“Would that be your vision, Thane?” Ivy asked archly.

He either ignored her or hadn’t heard her at all, so rapt was he in contemplation of the vision that necessitated upholding. Finally he, the Atlas of the basement, said, “Look - there isn’t – there just isn’t any room for mistakes at this point. We’re way past that.” He thought of the girl from the Rose City Weekly and her sharp sharp pencil. Crap! He never did get her name down, the sweet little bird…

“I didn’t make a mistake,” Dax said. His voice was thin and even but behind his oval frames his eyes blazed like a pair of vengeful comets. “I’ve always played the same thing. Even on the record.”

The record. “What?” he said. “You played that on the record? Vector?”

“Guess it didn’t bother you until now, huh?” Dax said. He hoped he didn’t sound as smug as he felt. Because I’m The Mommy, That’s Why!

“Dax…,” Thane said, slowly, like he was speaking to an armed and dangerous lunatic, “I cannot BELIEVE you can just stand there and tell me – proudly, it seems – tell me that you sabotaged my…my…”

“Vision?” Ivy suggested.

“Art?” Dax offered.

“My music,” Thane said. He appeared to be on the verge of tears. Lugubriously he took the guitar off his neck and placed it against the concrete basement wall. Then he leaned on the concrete with an outstretched hand, facing away from them, summoning the strength for what he must do next. Ivy and Dax watched with curiosity.

After several seconds Thane straightened up. “I’m taking a break,” he said. “Ten minutes.” He crossed the basement without looking at them and slowly, sadly, went up the stairs.

“What a…primadonna,” Ivy said. She twirled a drum stick in her hand, Tommy Lee-style. “He is fucking losing it.”

Dax leered the leer of the avenged. “Did you see his face when I told him I played that note on the record?” he asked. “He said I sabotaged it. Haw! He looked like he just found out he has cancer of the prick.”

Ivy raised an eyebrow at him. “Can you get that?” she asked.

Frowning, Dax said, “I think so. Did you ever see Donnie Brasco?”

She hadn’t.

“It doesn’t matter,” Dax said.

“I’m fucking embarrassed to even share a stage with him after that interview,” Ivy said. “I mean – was that some kind of a joke?” This was the first time they’d seen each other since the article came out and Ivy was eager to talk about it. She loved mocking their oppressive leader anyway but this interview was beyond the pale. Seriously, yo.

“Thank God he didn’t mention us by name,” Dax said. “I wouldn’t be able to leave the house.”

“Do you think anyone is going to show up for this thing?” Ivy asked.

“Oh, they’ll be there,” Dax said authoritatively. “People really do like his music, no matter how much Thane tries to ruin it by talking about it. Plus the other bands have big draws.” He was talking about Felch and Nervous Letter, the bands who would be opening for them at Huffington’s. Big deal.

“Well, I hope I decide to show up,” Ivy said. Now she was paradiddling on her thigh. “You know…” She trailed off.

“What?” said Dax. “Spill it.”

“He’s incapable of realizing how much of an asshole he sounds like – I mean, he’s clueless.” Tappitytappitytappity went the drumsticks on her jeans.

“Incapable?” Dax said.

“Yeah,” Ivy said. “He’s literally – well, he’s just hard-wired that way. I feel sorry for him, in a way.”

“Mmmmmmm,” Dax said, implying that if there was empathy to be mustered on behalf of Thane Truman, it wouldn’t be coming from him.

Ivy shrugged. “Let’s just get through this fucking show,” she said. “Then we’ll see where we’re at.” She sounded tough and determined, like a colonel in a movie, a movie with bad acting. It was all so dramatic.

Thane Truman was upstairs in Ivy’s kitchen, drinking water from a coffee mug. He knew exactly where he was at: a lion among sheep, a professional among amateurs. He sighed and steeled himself for another round of the Dax-Ivy show downstairs. The two of them were incapable of realizing that this wasn’t just about…about fucking entertainment. It was about…the Vision! He sighed to himself and smiled. They couldn’t help it. They were hard-wired that way. Literally.

4.
I used to like music, Samantha Owens thought ruefully as she settled in for another afternoon of hell in her little closet of an office at Huffington’s. The office – it was a sick joke to call it that – was smaller than her half-bath at home. There was a narrow grey metal desk with a computer on it crammed against one wall and an ugly steel chair she’d found on the curb by her house. The floor was obscured by piles of CDs, press kits, and notebooks stacked precariously on each other. Over the desk there was a huge poster of a leathered Elvis Presley at his 1968 comeback special. He was down on one knee, his eyes closed, mouth open, serenading the teary-eyed (mostly) female audience behind him. Sometimes she talked to Elvis about her stupid job, her stupid friends, her stupid life. He was a good listener. Lately she’d been feeling more pissed off than usual, pissed off at herself, really. That business last month…she shook her head, trying not to think about it. Shit happens….

Before she got the job booking at Huffington’s, Samantha had liked to go there to see bands. They had the best sound system in the whole city, the best. Now…she moaned inwardly. Now she hated being there! It was like a death sentence, this endless onslaught of press kits and emails and phone calls from desperate bands and managers vying for attention…the sheer quantity of the flak overwhelmed her, especially lately, and she felt like her ability to discriminate between the excellent and the merely adequate when it came to selecting bands for shows was disintegrating…everything sounded the same: a single jangling monolithic chorus of orchestral pop cleverness masquerading as something avant-garde…

She’d come in early on this particular afternoon to try to go through some of the backlogged press kits she’d received. The irony was that the better the club did, the more press kits came sailing in…and the more she got behind, and the more everything sounded alike…it was bound to catch up with her eventually. She was making progress today, though – she’d already 86’ed seven press kits and the floor was looking a little less cluttered then usual – excellent! Maybe she should start coming in the morning, way early – if she did that every day for a month the floor would be bare, she was sure of it. And then Lisa Dennis appeared in the open doorway (there was no door) and said, “Hi hi hi there!”

Samantha stared at her in horror. What was this…skank doing here?

The skank walked into the office, as far as such a thing was possible, given the claustrophobic environs – a pace and a half brought her to the edge of Samantha’s desk, which she sat on, her bulky gluteus making itself at home. What the fuck? “Nice office,” the skank said. She had a thin, cruel smile on her face.

“May I help you?” Samantha asked. Her countenance was glacial but there was something else there, something buried deep in the ice like an prehistoric mammoth – it was fear.

“I bet you, can, Sam,” the skank said. Sam! Nobody – nobody! – called her Sam…but the rising terror in her guts short-circuited the violent reflex arc that this required. The skank knew her name! And she knew the skank’s face…oh no…

The skank shifted her mass on the desk and managed to knock over a stack of press kits on the floor. “Whoa,” she said. “Sorry.” The computer monitor wobbled dangerously.

“Have we met?” Samantha asked.

Lisa cocked her head at her like a fat puzzled chicken. “Met?” she said. “Met? Yeah, I guess you could say that.” She giggled to herself.

Samantha stared the useless stare of the doomed.

“See,” the skank was saying, “see – I’m Lisa, by the way, thanks for asking – see, we have a problem on our hands, a problem child we need to discipline, together, see?” She sniffed. Her eyes looked like they were – what? Varnished. The skank wasn’t making any sense.

Samantha tried bluffing. “Lisa, look – I’m so busy right now-” – here she swept her arm before her in a grandiose fashion intended to indicate the Herculean nature of the tasks that confronted her – “maybe you can, you know, email me and we can address your concerns that way?” It wasn’t meant to be a question but it came out like one. The bitch was sitting on her desk! Polluting her ergonomics with her skanky ass germs!

“Sam,” Lisa said, “Sam, Sam, Sam…” She shook her head. “I saw you.” This last sentence was delivered in a quiet, almost sad, tone that brought the mammoth into sharp relief through the sheets of ice. Terror!

“Saw me where?” Samantha said. But she already knew.

Lisa shook her head again like she was talking to a prevaricating child who just wasn’t getting it. “At that party,” she said. “Last month.”

Last month… Samantha nodded slowly, as though awaiting further details about at that party last month for the sake of a good memory jog. “Last month?” she said.

“Oh come on,” Lisa said. “Cut the shit. I walked in on you and your – your paramour when you were fucking each others’ brains out in the guest bathroom. Remember?”

Shit happens…

Samantha just stared and stared.

“His name is Dimer, right? I’m not sure what his last name is. He’s got a mole on his ass – did you know that?” She held up a thumb and forefinger between which Elvis’ lips could be seen, parted in an eternal profession of leathery love. “’Bout this big. Does your husband know about Dimer and his big big mole?” Pronounced cock.

Plead the fifth…kill the bitch…deny everything…a bewildering menu of potential praxes careened through the arcade of her mind but she elected instead to cling to her current punctured and sinking lifeboat of a strategy, which was to stare in horror at the skanky shark circling in the waters.

“I mean, it’s none of my business what you do, except when it intersects with my – my self-interest, see?” Lisa said. She did her Cruella DeVille thing again with her lips and Samantha thought of maimed Dalmatians. “I just need you to do one tiny thing for me, one tiny little thing.” Up went the thumb and forefinger but this time there was no room between them for Elvis’ lips or hips or anything else. It was that tiny, this favor.

“What?” Samantha said. Fucking terrorist bitch.

“You know that Thane Truman show? The CD release show – the one with Felch and Nervous Lever?”

“Letter,” said Samantha.

“Whatever,” Lisa Dennis said.

“What about it?” Samantha said. She wondered if anyone would come looking for this skank if she killed her. She might get some kind of civic award.

“Well,” Lisa said, the tempo of her words quickening, “I have these friends who want to play that show, really want to play it, just a short set, a quickie – you know about those, right? A quickie, that’s all. You can put them on the bill, right?”

What the fuck? Too bad, bitch. “No can do,” Samantha said, some of her confidence returning. “That’s impossible.”

The skank and the slag regarded one another severely. Was this checkmate? Stalemate? A lull? Finally Lisa said, “Oh, it’s possible. They don’t need to set anything up. Just a CD player and a couple of microphones.”

“Look,” Samantha said (pronounced look, you fucking skank), “I’m not affirming or denying your accusation –” – had she really just said that? – “but I will tell you there is no fucking way I can accommodate your pathetic attempt at blackmail even if I wanted to. That show has been nailed down for two and a half months. If you have a friend who wants to play here they can send me a press kit like every other fucking musician in the world –” – you go, girl, Elvis said – “- but right now you can take your fat fucking skanky ass off my desk and out of my fucking office because you and I have nothing to say to one another.” She was already concocting a story in her head. Honey, this crazy bitch showed up at work today and tried to blackmail me with some bullshit concocted about me and Dimer Brzezowski…

Lisa shrugged. “Well, I doubt your husband will be happy to hear that you can’t find any room on the bill for my friend.” She shook her head again like this made her very, very sad.

“He’ll get over it,” Samantha said.

“Yeah?” Lisa said. “Will he get over this?” She took a cell phone out of her pocket and fiddled with it. Samantha watched and waited. What next?

A moment later there came the sound of a male voice. It was muffled and there was the ambient sound of traffic in the background. “Hold on,” Lisa said.

That voice…it was…it was Dimer Brzezowski!

“What the fuck do you care that I slept with her?” it was saying. “Who the fuck are you, anyway?”

“Just a concerned friend,” Lisa Dennis’ voice said from the cell phone. Lisa looked like a cat that has cornered a gerbil and is going to take its time torturing it to death.

“Fuck the fuck off. Her husband knows. It’s an open relationship,” Dimer said.

Lisa Dennis did something with the phone and it went silent. She tucked it away again in the pocket of her sordid jeans. “There’s more,” she said. “I’m don’t think you need to hear it, though. It’s more of the same. I’m sure your husband would be delighted to hear you two have an open relationship.” Her voice was a filthy dishrag dripping with sarcasm.

“What did you do, you cunt?” Samantha said. She had never, ever called another woman a cunt before. She had never used the word before except in the context of quoting someone else – a movie, an anecdote…

“I went to see Dimer at his work. He works at Severn Severn’s – did you know that? Of course you did. There are all sorts of interesting things to know.” Here she gave Samantha an evil wink that made her shudder. The mammoth was all lit up now like a Christmas tree on fire.

“That’s illegal,” Samantha said lamely.

“What?” Lisa said. “Going to see Dimer at his work? Or recording our conversation? It’s not actually illegal to record your own conversations. Isn’t that fascinating?” The malevolent wink! Again! “And even if it was – well, I don’t see how that changes anything when it comes to this problem child we’re rearing, huh?”

Samantha was back to staring and saying nothing. Her faculty of speech seemed to have shut down for the afternoon.

“So!” Lisa said in that voice that implies Our Business Is Pretty Much Wrapped Up Here. “I’ll tell my friend we’re all set for this weekend, okay?” She rose from the desk and glanced over her shoulder at Elvis. “Hey!” she said. “Nice poster.”

The adulteress made the slutty sound of silence.

“Oh,” Lisa said. “Don’t worry about promotion and all that shit.” She smiled. “And I promise – after the show I erase the recording and I never mention it again. Promise.” She held up two intertwined fingers in fealty. Then she chugged her way out of the pathetic excuse for an office and disappeared down the concrete stairwell.

Samantha Owens sat there in her ugly chair, stunned. The mammoth was all thawed out now and had begun thundering its way across an apocalyptic waste, its tusks flashing like the trumpets of archangels, summoning their legions of doom.

Goodnight, Elvis said. Goodnight.


5.
The next day Crimson Clover and Lisa Dennis sat at a table in the corner of the main dining room at Ali’s. The smell of Lebanese food wafting over from the kitchen was mixed with something florid – lavender? CC was meticulously devouring an enormous falafel sandwich. He had a peculiar habit when it came to eating that annoyed Lisa Dennis immensely – he would take a huge bite, and then, while masticating, inspect the sandwich he held, scrutinizing it like a jeweler, planning his next bite. This meant he made very little eye contact throughout the meal and was therefore oblivious to Lisa Dennis’ baleful porcine orbs scrutinizing him, in turn, as she wondered how the fuck he got to be so annoying.

It was an unholy union, this friendship of theirs. For whatever reason CC tolerated her bitching and moaning and mewling and puling about her bullshit pathetic excuse for a life. CC’s self-interest in their friendship was more enigmatic. They had met years earlier, around the time that he came out, and Lisa sometimes wondered, briefly, if this had something to do with it…

Lisa had already finished her rice with lentils and caramelized onions – mjadra, it was called. She always finished first when they went out to eat because she didn’t feel the need to fucking examine her food every time she took a bite. She pushed the plate away from her and leaned forward on her forearms, nearly knocking over a plastic pitcher of ice water in the process. “Well?” she said.

“Well, what?” CC said through a mouthful of starch.

“Did you ask them?” Lisa said.

CC looked at her for the first time since their food had arrived. “Mmmmmm,” he said.

“What the fuck does that mean?” she asked him.

“I asked them,” he said. He looked back at his sandwich and sighed the sigh of the unjustly detained.

“And?” Lisa said. “What did they say when you axed them?”

Now he was staring at her. “Well, Lawdy, Mis’ Dennis, I sho’ ‘nuff done axed them all right,” he said, and gave her his best Stepin Fetchit grin but his eyes were toxic. “But I ain’t heard from ‘em yet.”

“All right, all right,” she said. “I’m fucking sorry.”

“Mmmmmm,” he said again.

“Do you think you might hear something from them sometime soon? I mean, this show is two days from now.” She drummed two fingers on the table impatiently.

He took another bite and she waited and waited while he chewed and inspected. Finally he said, “They said they’d let me know tonight.”

“Tonight?” she repeated.

“That’s what they said.” He glanced at her again with a look that said Can I please finish my fucking dinner now?

“Okay,” Lisa said. She was quiet for a moment and then she said, “You knew those guys before you – came out, right?”

“Mmmm-hmmmm,” CC said.

“Was it hard for them to accept you as a fag?” Lisa asked.

He smiled at her, looking tired. “They’re still working on it,” he said. “They’re not the most liberal brothers in the world – know what I’m saying?”

Lisa nodded sagely, and the wattle of flesh beneath her chin shook and shook.

“Can I ask you something?” CC said. “Why do you hate this Thane fool so much?”

Lisa didn’t say anything. She seemed to be gazing into the plastic pitcher of water.

“Come in, fag hag,” CC said. “This is Mission Control.”

“I heard you,” Lisa said. “He’s just – you know, the way he treats people. He’s a prick.”

“What happened when you went out with him?”

“What happened?” She looked flustered. “Nothing happened. He was just an asshole.”

“Okay,” CC said. “It’s none of my business, really.”

“That’s right,” she said.

“I’m going to order one of those peach yogurt drinks,” CC said.

“Great,” Lisa said. Another half hour of peering, and sipping, this time. The coke in her pocket was calling her. “I’m gonna go powder my nose.”

CC wrinkled his. “You’re the only person I know who likes to eat while they’re blowing,” he said.

“Yeah, well, I’m special,” Lisa said, getting up.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” CC said, scrutinizing the last bit of sandwich he held.

“Just fucking eat it,” Lisa said to him as she strode toward the powder room. “It’s all the same anyway.”

Not to me, CC thought to himself. Sometimes he wondered why he even bothered with this bitch. It wasn’t for the witty repartee - that was for certain.

6.
That night there was another practice at Ivy’s house. They were taking a break and standing around in the kitchen upstairs. Thane seemed less agitated this evening – he hadn’t thrown any hissy fits and had even complimented Ivy on her timing. Now he was rambling on about who was coming to the CD release show and who might be coming and on and on and on. Dax cut him off.

“Do you think we’ll ever, like, have a name?”

Thane fell silent and Ivy did her Oh boy sigh. After a minute he spoke. “Who? Name what?”

“Us,” Dax said. “Our band.”

“What does it matter?” Thane said thinly.”We’re billed as Thane Truman.”

“Yeah, that’s you all right,” Dax said, “you know, what do I tell people? ‘I play bass for Thane Truman?’”

Thane shrugged. “What’s wrong with that?”

“How about ‘The Thane Truman Band?’” Ivy suggested. He ignored her.

“It’s lame,” Dax said. “Like Felch. That’s a good band name.”

“Do you know what that means, Felch?” Thane said.

“Yeah,” Dax said. “So what?”

“It’s fucking stupid is what it is,” Thane said.

“How about ‘Shrimping?’” Ivy said. Ignore, ignore.

“Well, I don’t know what difference it makes if we have a name or not,” Thane said. “It’s the same music regardless of what you call it.” He hoped this would put an end to the matter.

“Your music, right?” Dax said. He was feeling pugnacious.

“Well, yeah,” Thane said. “You write any bass solos lately?”

Silence. Dax seemed to shrink by several centimeters.
“Well, then,” Ivy said.

Thane, interpreting Dax’s silence as surrender, was moving on. “I was thinking,” he said. “After this CD comes out officially, things are going to change for us.” He had a faraway look in his eyes. “Doors are going to open and we’re going to have to decide which ones we should go through and which ones we should ignore.”

Ivy and Dax were visibly unmoved by this prophecy.

“Here’s the point,” Thane said. “We make no compromises. We don’t do anything that’s going to sully the vision.”

“Sully?” said Ivy.

He appeared not to have heard her. “What that means, practically speaking, when it comes to things like endorsements, or say, playing charity events, we need to take them on a case-by-case basis, you know. We want to do the right thing but this music I’m writing – and that you’re playing – is like gold, like diamonds. We can’t just be, like, giving it away…”

Dax had had enough. “Basta!” he yelled, cutting him off. “Basta! Enough!”

Thane frowned. “What’s this ‘basta’ shit?” He’d taken French.

Dax turned around, strode two paces, and turned back around again to face his oppressor. Now he cupped both hands around his mouth and yelled it again. “Basta! No more!” He was changing color – he looked like a raging plum. He made a fist, knuckles pointed at Thane, and raised its middle finger. This was a Latino hand gesture that meant “Enough!” that he’d picked up somewhere, but the subtlety of this was lost on his bandmates. All they saw was the middle finger.

“Calm down,” Ivy said.

“Do you know what an asshole you are, Thane Truman?” Dax yelled. “A…hubristic asshole?”

Thane frowned. “Basically,” he said.

“Then you know what comes next, right?” Dax walked over to Thane and poked him in the chest, hard. Thane glanced down at Dax’s outstretched index finger and then looked back up at his face but he didn’t say anything.

“I’ll play this show, Thane, and that’s it,” Dax said, more quietly now. “Find yourself a new fuckin’ bassist, ok? I am so sick of your I’m-a-brilliant-misunderstood-artist trip.”

Ivy whistled, making a sound like a bottle rocket going off. “Crap,” she whispered.

Thane just looked at him. “Ok,” he said. “If that’s what you want.”

“What I WANT?” Dax said. “Is that what you just said?”

Thane shrugged and started pacing the length of the small kitchen. “Dax, I’m not your mother. Do whatever you need to do. It’s not like you’re irreplaceable.”

“Thane…,” said Ivy, but it was too late.

“Okay, prick, okay,” said Dax. “Have fun playing your stupid fucking show. I won’t be there. You’ll have to tell me how it goes, Ivy.”

“Dax…,” Ivy said this time.

Dax started frantically waving his hands about his head like he was deflecting a swarm of tsetse flies. “No, no, no, no,” he was saying. “No ‘Dax’ nothing. I quit. Goodbye. I’ll get my fucking bass later.” And then he was gone. The front door slammed shut.

“Okay!” Thane said brightly, in the voice that says Let’s Get Back To Work. “Ready to practice?”

Ivy didn’t say anything. They could hear Dax stomping away down the street outside: STOMP STOMP STOMP STOMP STOMP. The sidewalk sounded hollow.

“C’mon, Ivy!” Thane said, still sounding spunky. “We don’t need him!”

“No,” Ivy said in a small voice. “But I do.”

Suddenly Thane didn’t have a faraway look in his eyes anymore and he didn’t look spunky. He looked defeated, like a kid whose family has discovered atheism and is canceling Christmas forever.

“He’s right, you know,” Ivy said. “You really are a prick.”

“Ok,” Thane said. “Et tu, Ivy?” A small, sad smile.

Ivy looked at the dish drainer, the electric can opener, the clock on the stove, anywhere but at Thane Truman’s face. “Yeah,” she said finally. “Me too.”

Ten minutes later he was in the car with his gear driving home. It’s not their fault, he told himself, feeling like Allah the Merciful. They’re just not in the same league…He remembered how he’d felt at the beginning of that interview with the woman-child from the Rose City Weekly, like a demiurge at play…that was the thing! Once you were on the mountain-top, in the eye of the storm, you didn’t have time for social niceties, for coddling the delicate psyches of the Daxes and Ivys of the world…up here there was the warm wind of the creative genius and the expanse before him and that was all…he smiled to himself. Not everyone would understand – hell, probably most people wouldn’t understand, but a few would, a few now, and a few in the next generation, and in the generation after that…a secret alliance of…hyperaesthetes?... hyperaesthetes carrying the logos through the cosmos. What would it be like, playing this CD release show by himself? Could he do it? And then he banished all doubt from his mind. Doubt was for the weak, for the sheep, who, he reminded himself in his divine and merciful way, were born sheep and couldn’t be otherwise. Hard-wired to be sheep… He thanked the invisible god, thanked himself, that he was born for better things. Then he wondered if that cookie from the Rose City Weekly would be at the show, and if she’d be wearing her tight, tight T-shirt with the spies on it, all bent to hell. He hoped so.

Part Two

8.

Huffington’s had a luminescent, vaulted ceiling supported by pale pillars, each one wrapped in very real-looking plastic olive wreaths. The source of the luminescence was unclear – something like phosphorescent moss (though it couldn’t have actually BEEN that) coated much of the ceiling, casting a pale glow. At the rear of the club there were tables with checkered cloths and chic steel chairs with leatherette cushions that pitched slightly forward toward your food and beer when you sat in them. Here the carpet was just short of being lush – it was rather like a forest of young autumnal trees, and it was lovingly shampooed, vacuumed, and brushed at least twice a week by a generous Slav named Vrit. Beyond this part of the club was a wide space for dancing or gawking at the bands – the floor was poured forth back and forth before the stage in gorgeous oak panel strips like paths for golden plows. The strips lit up in a most creamy and delicious manner when as the lights flooded the floor. The lights themselves were festive and animated; during shows they bounced from the walls to the paths for golden plows and back again over the faces of the audience…

…but on this occasion Huffington’s was empty except for a couple of bored sound techs who were sitting on the stage, drinking Pabst, with Madonna blaring out of the enormous speakers that flanked the stage like black centaurs. This was why they failed to hear one Thane Truman knocking at the side door, thoroughly encumbered with various devices in cases, and with amplifiers, and with other implements he had unpacked from his car, which was double parked there on Navy St. At first his knocking was a gentle tap tap tap but after several of these engendered no response, he went with for a more manly kind of pounding, with the side of his fist. After a few minutes he called Samantha Owens on her cell phone…

…and it buzzed at her from the bathroom table at the head of the bath, and in the bath was a somewhat intoxicated Samantha Owens who stiffened visibly with this intrusion – then she reached over and picked up the phone with a wet hand. “Fuck,” she thought out loud, and held it aloft before her. The bath, an 1890’s porcelain clawfoot number, was stuffed – there was no other word for it – stuffed with bubbles; they merrily flew through the air like silver clusters of grapes each time she moved…She hadn’t said anything to Thane, hadn’t said anything to anybody. Her strategy so far for dealing with the skank and her blackmail had been to avoid anything to do with work as much as possible, especially Thane Truman, and especially today. She had considered her options carefully – quitting, telling her husband, or both – or telling the cunt (that word!) to fuck off and let come what hell may. She wasn’t sure what good quitting would do, except it would spare her the indignity of being compelled to respond to the aftermath of whatever nightmare Lisa had made of the evening. It would certainly mean an end to her…ahem…career (that joke for an office!) as a booking agent here in the Rose City. Shit. She felt a little sorry for Thane Truman, but she didn’t feel like telling him he was going to share the stage with an unknown quantity, and she definitely didn’t want to talk about why. In her mind’s eye she saw that bitch with her pig’s eyes and her sinister jowly wattles…why had this happened to her? What wretched luck! Of course she had to be…caught (how tawdry!) in her sordid, lusty, canine rutting by someone with a freaking agenda, especially someone like this spiteful piece of shit, this…she pictured herself happily drowning Lisa Dennis in the merry bubbly bathtub, holding her underwater by her greasy black hair, her own triceps quivering with the effort…

Now Thane was not entirely alone in his wait there on good old Navy Street – he had a witness, or a pair of them, to his undignified predicament, which was that he was unable to leave the gear there on the street while he went to park the car for fear of thieves and opportunists who might spirit it away in his absence – or else he could resign himself to reloading the car again with the same equipment, parking it, and hauling it a good parsec or two from whatever overpriced parking garage he managed to find, and who wanted to do that? Finally he opted for moving it all into a little niche of a doorway adjacent to the entrance of Huffington’s, the entrance to an insurance company called Nestor and Page that had shut down for the day. The street was mostly vacant – he couldn’t see Lisa and Crimson, the witnesses, due to the tinted windows in Clover’s 1989 orange-peel colored Durango…the car was, of course, parked and shut off, drawing no attention to itself, in sharp contrast to his own, which was parked in neutral, its engine on, its hazard lights ticking like an old fashioned time bomb. They watched his antlike labors with interest – there were amps and great vinyl bags, like hockey bags, stuffed with quarter inch cords and speaker cables and exotic effects pedals with names like Hyperfuzz and the Max. There were cardboard boxes of CDs bound for the merch table. And of course there was the acoustic guitar in its dour coffin-like black case. Finally he cast a lonely glance at the equipment before speeding off in the Rabbit, on the hunt.

“Whoaa….,” Lisa breathed. She had on a ridiculous pointed hat that made her look like an evil swollen dwarf – it was pulled down low over her porcine orbs in case the tinting in the Durango’s windows failed them. CC was much calmer. He was wearing a gorgeous African oufit, like a dashiki, only flashier, with sequins rising in arcs above the colorful square patterns that circled his waist. It was very cool, this getup of his – the look was pure Gay Black Man About Town. It made him a little contemptuous of his companion. He hoped she wasn’t going in, not in that ratty sweatshirt and those too-tight jeans that almost – well, he hated to say what it was, but it was a camel-toe, really…the sight of it had depressed him in some inexplicable way when she had come out of her apartment to get in the car – should he say something?

“Are you going in?” he said finally.

She turned and looked at him blankly. “Not now,” she said.

“In that?” He jerked a chin at the sweatshirt, the camel-toe.

She peered closely at her own outfit, there in the passenger seat of the Durango, as though she had never seen it before.

“You’re a little underdressed, honey,” he said.

Lisa sniffed violently, and black caterpillars of phlegm born shifted their position in her sinus cavities. “My Nelson Mandela outfit is at the cleaner’s.” She was gazing around the interior of the Durango, looking for…

Instead of saying You know, Lisa, sometimes you’re a real bitch, which the moment demanded, CC just said: “What’re you looking for?”

“Is that your goat?” Lisa said.

She was talking about a stuffed animal that lay on its side on the floor of the car behind the driver’s seat – it was a diminutive, forlorn-looking ratty little thing about six inches high. It had once been white, probably, but time and entropy had colored it British Industrial Revolution gray.

“It’s my niece’s,” said CC.

“Is she attached to it?” Lisa said.

“I doubt it,” CC said. “It’s been back there for a about a year.”

Lisa reached over and picked it up. “Can I have it?”

“I guess so,” said CC. “Why? Or,” – here his eyes twinkled – “that is to say: now that you’ve got my goat, what are you going to do with it?”

The goat-getter reached for the door handle and got out of the car without
saying a word.

9.
About an hour later Samantha Owens, no longer intoxicated except in that sort of headachy stomachqueasy kind of way, was racked by a case of…what? Guilt? The Doubts? No – it was something else…it was a heavy draught of Rage, spiked with Humiliation…she was laying on the bed staring at the ceiling. The ceiling was heavily stuccoed and bore a heady resemblance to the lunar surface as depicted in many a Nova special…but all Samantha could see was Lisa Dennis’ face floating in the afternoon light like a succubus, a bulbous night witch…that CUNT (that word again)...it was the most hateful epithet she could muster but it seemed unequal to the weight of the…ATROCITY that had been committed…Blackmail! Her teeth vibrated with anger and she could taste bile. One tiny little favor…what guarantee was there that the skank, emboldened with fresh victories, wouldn’t start demanding more crazy shit from her? Appeasement! What was next? Money? Sexual favors? And what kind of way was this to live? Hiding out at home, ignoring the cell phone, dreading the inevitable email her boss was sure to wing at her after the evening played out…what could she say? Her mind ran and ran in this fashion like an errant can opener but before long she became aware of another force thrashing itself to life within her – it was the most primordial of impulses: the will to disobey…

Samantha sat up on the bed and lit a cigarette. The smoke drifted through the afternoon light in wispy clouds of infinite complexity and she fumed and fumed. That bitch. She wondered again if she could kill another human being and then decided that she could. Not that this skank was a human being…she was a porcine demon, a real fucking monster. What was happening to Thane right now? She could call the club and just check in with Pavey, the head sound guy. Yeah, just seeing how things are going…no, I’m not feeling so hot…probably just come in tomorrow…oh, fuck. She stubbed the cigarette out in a beer can on the bedside table and then she stood up, her hands on her hips.

Fuck it. She was going into work. Lisa Dennis could go fuck a duck. I’m sorry, Bill, she said to her husband with her mind. I’m sorry for what happened and for whatever’s going to happen. She felt like calling him and getting it all out in the open.

Her husband, who was being merrily fellated by a seventeen-year old man-child (professionally, discreetly, punctually) downtown in the back of a 1992 Buick Starlight, could not be reached for comment.

10.
At the same time Thane Truman was sitting at the bar at Huffington’s. The bar ran along the back of the club from one carpeted corner to another. He had his back to the tables but he was keeping a vigilant eye on the door for people he knew, or would like to know. Mainly he was looking out for the journalista from the RCW. Cassie - that was her name. He was positive.

However, there was one weird thing going on, though, one weird thing…it had been little more than a vague, dismissible apprehension at first, but now it was a full-fledged, undeniable observation:

There certainly were a lot of African-American people here this evening.

Now in a city like the Rose City, most of which is whiter than a mayonnaise sandwich, a mayonnaise sandwich on fucking Wonder Bread, the sight of even a single black person is almost a newsworthy event. And here, in the heart of the heart of Mecca Harmonic, at Huffington’s? Well…for whatever reason (and as much as the generous but callow liberal transplants of the Rose City might wish otherwise)…oh, this is terribly embarrassing – it’s probably better left unspoken, probably…well – it’s that rock shows are not very popular with the African Americans, no, they are not. Perhaps in other cities, in New York, in Detroit, in Atlanta, in Miami, the brothers and sisters mix it up with the Caucs like one of Martin Luther King’s wet dreams but…well, the sight of all these black folks here at Huffington’s is a trifle unusual, is what it is, at least to Thane Truman. Was Felch a hip hop band? No, he remembered – they were some kind of microtwee outfit from Pasadena…and Nervous Letter was as jangly as indie bands came these days…but why couldn’t black people like them? Thane felt a twinge of self-loathing…maybe if people like him didn’t…well, didn’t assume that African Americans weren’t going to be in attendance then they might be more likely to put in an appearance. The assumption was contagious, was what it was. Thane managed to feel simultaneously proud of himself for recognizing the insidious nature of such assumptions and guilty for continuing to have them…but then he came out of it. Ridiculous! It was ridiculous to think that black people didn’t come to rock shows because of what he or anyone else thought. If they liked the music, they would come, wouldn’t they? Like anyone else! So it was the music. Not good enough? Not soulful enough? Thane quivered with something like resentment. What were they doing here?

[Editorial note: Crimson Clover insists this is an unfair depiction of life here in the Rose City and has asked me to permit him a moment to rebut it. I present his oral rebuttal here in full: “Man, it’s just as diverse here as any other city in America. We got Russians and Cambodians and Mexicans and…we got all kinds of Muslims and Hindus – we got Buddhists: Japanese Buddhists, Chinese Buddhists. There’s a bunch of Buddhists that live around the corner from my house, know what I’m saying? Y’all just need to get out of your mayonaisse neighborhoods once in a while. There’s tons of n______s here – they just don’t hang out where you hang out. Maybe you better get your pale pink ass out of the house once in a while and, uh, conduct some reconnaissance missions behind the lines and shit, know what I’m saying? ‘Cause when you write shit like that people start to believe it, and th e more they believe it, the whiter everything looks, until they don’t even SEE the other people living here, the Asians and the Latinos and all the beautiful soul brothers and sisters.” I’m not sure this explicitly counters my own assertions, at least not for the sake of this narrative, but in the interests of inclusiveness I let his statement remain here. Note he does not deny the self-imposed cultural segregations one often encounters at entertainment venues such as rock clubs, such as Huffington’s. When I asked him why it’s rare to run into African-Americans in any number at Huffington’s he gave me a dirty look and told me he was done talking for now and I was “ass out.”]

The club was starting to fill up – there were the usual suspects: beardos with their ironic T-shirts (Because I’m The Mommy, That’s Why!) and trucker hats, the pale daisies with their crimson highlights and the tight tight jeans that threatened to cleave their glutei in two…and the unexpected guests, the soulful brothers and sisters, in puffy North Face jackets and snow white sneakers, with gold-studded earrings and silver watches…some of the guys were dressed to the nines – blue sports coats and pink dress shirts...and a couple of them (Them! Thane thinks, guiltily) had the same individualized color schemes going on cap a pie as though someone had held them by their faces and dunked them in very fashionable and expensive cans of paint…they were gorgeous.

Gorgeous…Thane, resplendent in a pair of jeans and a fairly drab button-down, felt a little natty.

Well, he didn’t have the luxury of pursuing this line of thought any further – he had a show to play. He’d made some changes in the set to compensate for the absence of his traitorous former bandmates; namely, he’d brought some pre-recorded drum loops with him and a…ahem…CD with some hastily recorded bass lines on it with which to accompany himself. He shuddered inwardly. He, Thane Truman, the future of rock music, had been reduced to bringing pre-recorded bass tracks with him… No one else would possibly care, even if they noticed – his was an age of samples and drum loops and keyboards that looked like enormous cell phones with blinking red lights and panic buttons. It was almost fucking reactionary to play everything live on stage…but inwardly he cursed Dax and Ivy, especially Dax. Dax! He wanted to wring his gawky neck. Sheep will be sheep will be sheep…

He spotted a porky woman sitting at the bar about five seats away, next to a black man in some kind of African prince costume…why did she look familiar? And then a voice from the other side of him:

“Thane?”

He turned around and there was Cassie, or Cassady, or whatever her name was, looking positively ready for plucking in a Whore of Babylon-red miniskirt and a lacey black top that for some reason made him think of S & M scenarios…

“Heeeeeyyyy,” he said, not wanting to say her name in case he was wrong. But where did he know that other woman at the bar from, the one with the piggy eyes? And where was Samantha?

11.
“That’s him?” Crimson Clover said doubtfully. He wrinkled his nose. “He doesn’t look like much to get upset over...”

Lisa glared at him. “Who’s upset?” she said, and polished off her whiskey sour. The bartender, whom she hadn’t tipped, didn’t look like she was in any hurry to get her another one.

CC shrugged. “Not me,” he said. “Isn’t that why we’re here? Your vendetta?”

Lisa rapped on the table in an unsuccessful attempt to summon the bartender. “It’s not personal, if that’s what you’re wondering about,” she said.

“Not personal?” CC said.

At this point a tall African-American man in baggy jeans and a bright green T-shirt materialized behind them and tapped CC on the shoulder. Lisa gave him the once-over through varnished eyes.

“What’s up, dog?” the man said to CC.

“Heeey, Francis,” said CC. He leaned toward Francis from the stool and the two of them did some kind of shoulder-bump handclasp thing. “Yo, Francis, this is Lisa,” CC said, gesturing at her.

“Charmed,” said Lisa, extending a limp hand, which Francis shook tentatively.

“Yo, man,” said Francis, “thanks for hooking this shit up, you know, yeah, I mean, that’s cool, really cool, letting us get our jam on here, you know.”

“Thank her,” CC said, gesturing toward Lisa Dennis. “She hooked it up, really.”

“Oh yeah?” said Francis. “That’s dope, man, dope.”

Lisa tried to look bored but there was a self-congratulatory gleam in her eye that made her even less attractive then usual. “Yeah,” she said.

“So is this your lady now?” Francis said to CC. “You quit the team?”

“Shit, nigga,” said CC. “I didn’t quit the team. Why? You looking to sign up?”

Francis shook his head. “Naw,” he said. “I like me those dime piece ho’s, nigga. I’m a dime piece juicer, yo.”

This last sentence, whatever it meant, was evidently very funny to CC and Francis, and they both shook with genuine amusement. Lisa shrugged to herself. It was some black thing.

12.
The evening plowed on. By ten it was impossible to execute a proper cartwheel, if one might wish to do so, without bumping into an ironic T-shirt or a North Face ket. Everyone was there – by which I mean everyone of importance. I was there. Didn’t see you.
Gracie BonBon of Devil May Care records was there, twirling one of her pigtails around her finger in a very sexy, intimidating manner. So were the editors of Time To Pretend, the infamous local music zine. Dysfunction Junction the video artist was there and so were Kanta and Punta, the rhythm section of Fjords for Francis, with whom he’d been working lately, working, working, uhuhuhuhuhuhuh, oh, they’d been working all right…Kanta and Punta had long icy blonde hair parted in the middle; their soft faces glowed in the soft light of Huffington’s like a pair of virginal alien moons…and the promoter Big Puffin was there, looking tough and pasty, like he’d crawled out of the basement just to stab somebody in the lung. Gerald McBamBam of the McBamBam Brothers barbershop quartet was pacing back and forth before the bar like a panther, presumably waiting on a connection of some sort…Monica Tappins was there, and the ex-mayor’s sister, Denver Greer, who was a big name in CD distribution – she and her husband were freaking out over the macaroni and cheese at Huffington’s…what did they put in it, cinnamon?… and there were a lot of other folks of importance there as well who had never been to Huffington’s before – Mode D was there, and the producer DJ Freshbeat, and the backup singers for the Quarantine were there in matching blue dresses that clung to their behinds like electrostatic Saran Wrap…MC Post was there, keeping an eye on his girlfriend Janine, who was flirting with Pavey the sound guy at a table close to the entrance, and Little Rock the trumpet player was there, and the diva Lady Mystithon.

Thane was working the room, although the word “working” was a little extreme for what he was doing. Having dropped off his CDs at the merch table (which was being run by a cherubic blonde in some kind of mesh pink sweater), he was sort of floating around the room like a cartoon cloud, raining bits of shiny conversation into pairs and circles of people known and those not-yet-met. The trick was to tell them, to remind them, to inform them that he, Thane Truman, had a new record out called Vector, and it could be purchased this very evening. He loved that bit, the this very evening – it made everything seem like it was a turning point in a film or a novel – “No, sir, I’m afraid they said it would be this very evening,-” with commensurate (dramatic!) shocked surprise on the face of the protagonist…so he was drinking French Kisses and wandering about, always keeping one eye on the sassy from the paper and the other on the entrance for the arrival of Samantha Owens among the garlanded pillars - but mostly his mind was focused on the art of selling…well, it wasn’t himself he was selling, not really – it was the music, it was the music, it was the gorgeous album Vector with its single imperfection, which was Dax’s wretched F etched in digital arboreal circles on 2000 cds, forever, lending reference and measure to the whole, like the flaw in creation that makes Heaven so valued in comparison…ah, those fucks, fucking Ivy and Dax, the fucking amateur hard-wired sheep of America ready to desert their cause for the sake of a glinting glancing wound to their precious egos…a gash in the fabric of their miserable and pea-sized realities. He wondered if the pre-recorded bass lines were going to go over…ah, those sheep of sheep!
Crimson Clover was enjoying himself in spite of the company. Lisa Dennis kept going to the bathroom to snort more of Casper’s cocaine, and every time she got up, within a minute some other attendee would ask if they could sit at the beautiful bar, and CC would beam at them and say, “Yes, you can!” And they’d sit down and order a rum and coke or a porter or whatever. And after a few minutes a new and improved Lisa Dennis would reappear and get the same look on her face, which was abject disgust with CC for not saving her seat. So the first two times she was able to persuade or threaten her way back into HER seat but the third time some meaty jarhead wouldn’t even look at her, much less budge.

“You fuck!” she yelled at both of them, and flounced away. CC smiled and a minute later the jarhead, whose ears stuck out like coffee can lids on either side of his milky head, abandoned the seat anyway…and this time who should appear at the bar to order himself another French Kiss, on the house, of course…

“Excuse me,” Thane Truman said to Crimson Clover. “Anyone sitting here?”

“Naw,” CC said. He smiled. “Just you.”

Thane slid into position on the stool and CC beamed and beamed. He hoped Lisa Dennis showed up while her…ahem…ex-boyfriend (nothing personal!) showed up there ordering…a what? A French Kiss? That was a gay drink – he ought to know.

Thane sipped his gay drink and made sure Cassady/Cassie was still standing between two pillars by the wall - she was talking to some schlep with a moustache – he hated this trend toward moustaches…and CC looked at him expectantly.

“Can I ask you something?” Thane said finally. The French Kisses were starting to go to his head, which was saying a lot on account of its size.

CC nodded.

“Your, um, friend? Who was sitting here? The girl?” Thane leaned in confidentially, having forgotten about the art of selling, for the moment…

“Yes?” CC said. For some reason he thought of the guy with the laundry basket on his shoulder, his head in total eclipse. “You like her? Fifteen bucks.”

Thane was taken aback. “What?”

CC eyed him shrewdly but the lighthouse never shut down for a moment. “I’m just razzing, you man,” he said. “What about her?”

Thane recovered. “I think I know her,” he said, a little drunker than he ought to be considering the loops and pedals and amplifiers and preamps and little black boxes he needed to coordinate shortly.

“Hi, Thane,” said a passing beardo.

Thane waved at him but stayed focused. “So who is she?”

CC pretended he was starting to recognize him, like Thane was the head of an illegitimate government. “Oh, wait a minute,” he said through the fog of comic war. “You’re…Thane Truman!”

Thane couldn’t help blushing. “That’s right,” he said. He raised a hand, flat, palm out. “Guilty as charged.”

CC slapped his knee. “I looooove your music,” he gushed. “Really like it. Nice work.”

Thane was surprised but…okaaaay. Maybe his music was soulful after all. He withdrew his hand.

“So you’re here to see me?” he said.

“Oh, yes,” CC said. “I told lots of my friends –” – here he waved a hand at the mob – “to come out.” His eyes twinkled at the words come out but Thane didn’t notice a thing.

Ohhhhhhhhh, Thane thought. Was it possible that the guy had that many friends? Half the crowd seemed to be black. Maybe the guy’s love of his music had spread like a magnanimous soulful love virus through the black – through the African- American community…Wow…Vector was that good. Maybe it would be a crossover album. He pictured himself on…BET? Was that the name of it? In his Ptolemaic mind he saw himself doing a duet with Kanye West in a sultrily-lit studio somewhere. He had always liked black girls…at least in theory…

“This is my CD release show,” he said, regaining confidence. “I have CDs for sale, this very evening.”

“Wow,” CC said. “I’ve only heard you on the Internet, right? Well, I’ll have to get one. If you’re good tonight, of course.” He winked.

There was something suggestive about that wink but Thane ignored it. “So…,” he said. “Who’s your friend?”

At this moment the friend arrived. Felch was soundchecking and, at random intervals, generating great bursts of microtwee squealing feedback that caused the attendees to throw their hands over their ears, all together, like they were executing a dance move…

“Heeeeeyyyy,” Thane said. “I know you.”

Lisa didn’t seem to mind that THIS person was in her seat, CC noted. “Yeah?” she said.

“You’re Lisa…” She could almost see him scratching his head. “Denise!” He said finally.

Close. “Dennis,” she said.

“Oh,” he whispered. What were they putting in those French Kisses, moonshine? “We went on a date once.”

“Yes,” she said. Her eyes looked like they had been polished to a high sheen, like an oak table in a DustOff Aerosol commercial…

“When you were…” Thane trailed off.

“Thinner?” Lisa Dennis Not Denise offered.

CC giggled and Thane raised a hand in protestation. “No, no,” he said, speaking pure White Lie, “younger…when you – when we were younger.”

“Yeah, well, it was like eight years ago,” Lisa Dennis said.

“Here for the show?” Thane was bored now. Mystery solved. Felch was starting. The singer was a diminutive elfin lass dressed in black who was holding an electric tambourine. She smiled beatifically at the crowd beneath the mysterious phosphorescent ceiling. He really did need to ask Samantha how the fuck they did it. Where was she, anyway?

Lisa shrugged. “Thought I’d check it out.”

Thane was going into Imminent Departure mode – he was ready to go check in with his future biographer from the RCW. “Hey!” he said brightly. “This is my CD release show – I’ve got CDs for sale this very evening!”

Lisa didn’t say anything and then she said: “I think you’re in my seat.”

“Okay!” Thane said, jumping up. An avalanche of noise was tumbling from the PA speakers. They didn’t sound very microtwee so far. They sounded like a death metal band. “Nice to see you again! And what was your name?” This last question was directed at Crimson Clover.

“Mr. Laundry Head,” said Crimson Clover.

“Okay!” Thane said again. Whatever. “Enjoy the show!”

“Oh, we will!” Lisa said, and smiled evilly at him. But he was already gone.

12.
About halfway through Felch’s set Thane went to check on the gear backstage in the Green Room. The Green Room was the standard term for a room where musicians or artists could chill out before or after their sets when they’d had enough working the room or paying their dues or whatever they happened to call it if they called it anything. The name Green Room was slightly mysterious to Thane – all the clubs that had one called it that and he’d originally thought it had something to do with smoking marijuana. All the gear, Thane’s and Nervous Letter’s (Felch’s presumably currently in use on the battlefield of microtwee squall) was arranged in neat piles against the far wall. The Green Room at Huffington’s was especially nice – it had long red leather couches running parallel along two walls and a sandalwood half-moon table in the far corner, next to the gear, covered with a gold-colored tablecloth and decked out with all manner of finger foods, soft drinks, and cheap cans of beer in metal buckets of ice. There were rings of vegetables arranged in concentric circles on intricate doilies and tiny sandwiches with cucumbers and salmon on rye bread - or else you could have mozzarella and pepperoni on little round pieces slices of toast. There were squarish bronze trays stacked atop one another around a silver spine – they looked like the tiers of a ziggurat, overflowing with triangle-shaped pieces of pita bread and little jade bowls filled with hummus and smoked baba ganoush…the soft drinks weren’t Coke or Pepsi either – they had strange names like Orange Crème Oldschool and Garnet Brothers’ Cola-Cola and came in nostalgic glass bottles with giraffe-like necks, in contrast to the beer, which were strictly Downhome Ironic Chic: Pabst, Rainier, Olympia, and Buttrock, all in pull-tab cans. The walls were colored peach and pink – it looked like someone had painted them with sponges - and they had black symbols that looked very much like hieroglyphics marching back and forth across them, complete with cartouches and stylized birds that reminded Thane of seagulls. Thane was used to all of this – it was his due, as a warrior-bard! – but he scarcely noticed it, barely noticed the intricate manner in which the chef had arranged the vegetables on their little doilies…mostly he noticed the five young black men dressed in…well, they were all hip-hopped out, with baggy jeans that hung midthigh, exposing boxer shorts with checkered pastels – these were barely visible beneath the extra–large T shirts they were wearing…none of the shirts were the same color, but they were all monochromatic and bright – orange, yellow, red, green, darker green. Two of the guys were seated on one of the leather couches, legs spread wide and arms flung on either side of them along the top of the couch. Two of the others sat on the armrests at opposite ends of the couch and the fifth stood facing them. They had white sneakers on – Nikes, mostly – that looked like they had just come out of their boxes moments ago. They uniformly wore the laces loose, so that their little plastic ends poked out like the heads of snakes, at the highest eyeholes, and rose in great arching loose loops all the way down the tongues. The air was thick with clouds of smoke – marijuana, obviously. One of the young men sitting on the couch, who had a shaved head and a gold necklace, was holding something in his fingers that looked like a small smoldering cardboard worm. The five of them turned in unison and regarded Thane Truman with bored, vacant stares before going back about their business, which was talking to one another quietly and passing around the...what did you call it when you wrapped weed in cigar paper? A blunt. Then Thane noticed another person, someone obviously of some indie rock tribe or another – he had on a T-shirt that said, simply 1984! and a pair of male standard-issue Rose City Buddy Holly eyewear. He was munching on a carrot stick and giving Thane a look of bovine contentment.

Wha’? The Green Room was officially (and unofficially) for artists and their entourages. Thane gave the black guys the twice over and then returned his attention to his likeliest ally present, the…the white guy. (For shame!) The guy reminded him of Dax – he had the same frail, awkward appearance, like he might break in half if you flicked him with a finger. He nodded convivially at Thane, chewing, chewing…

Thane recognized him. He was in that band Nervous Letter – he had seen him in a promo shot that Samantha had emailed him the previous week. Thane was wondering if he should say something to him, something like Hey, I know you - do you know why all these brothers are hanging out back here in the Green Room? But the chewer spoke first:

“Hey, aren’t you Thane Truman?”

And then the suspiciously thespian parasympathetic blushing, the abashed gentle dip of his head that conveyed Who, me? so precisely, the gentle wringing of his hands: all of it followed suit in a great reflex arc of false humility. “Yeah?” he said.

The gawk walked one, two, three steps toward Thane and extended a pale/frail hand. “I love your music. I’m Sugarland – with Nervous Letter?” He gave Thane a limp smile.

One of the black guys abandoned his crew and approached the tray with the elaborate sandwiches on it. He was holding the last inch or so of the blunt in his bejeweled hands and seemed to be looking for a place to put it down, the better to help himself to the bounty of the Green Room. He peered at the sandwiches and wrinkled his nose like a rabbit.

“Can I get a…,” asked Sugarland, trailing off. He glanced significantly at the blunt. The guy looked at Sugarland as though he were speaking in ancient Assyrian and then shrugged and handed the blunt to him. Sugarland put it to his pursed lips, holding it like the tail of a rat that he’d caught between his two-forefingers and his thumb and inhaled deeply. A moment later he went into a horrid coughing fit, sending gales of bluish smoke sailing in all directions. He sounded like someone had just tried to drown him. This caused the gang of intruders to explode into torrents of raucous laughter.

The guy who had handed him the smoldering worm was gasping for air but he managed to say, “Man, you represent on that blunt.”

Sugarland gazed at him through watery eyes. “Represent what?” he said.

This served to drive the five of them toward even greater heights of hysteria, into the stratosphere, truly. The sandwich collector must have changed his mind about eating anything because the five of them wandered out, chuckling and snorting among themselves. “Sheeeeeeet,” one of them said.

“Who the fuck were they?” Thane said, and after he’d said it he realized that he’d amplified the they a little too much in a way that made it mean: those black guys who were in here and obviously weren’t supposed to be?

Sugarland coughed again into his fist, less violently this time, and then managed to compose himself. “They…they said they’re playing here tonight. Said they’re third.” Third meant last – there was no way to fit in four bands in a night, not really. Of course Sugarland didn’t know this.

Thane heard him but it didn’t register. Again and again the words flung themselves at his cerebral cortex, struggling for convolution and acknowledgement, but just they bounced off his mind like sparrows off a sliding glass door. This was because Thane had just noticed something conspicuously absent from the pile of gear he had brought in off the street and piled at the rear of the Green Room: the dour coffin-like case that held his acoustic guitar.

13.
So while Felch was finishing their set and Nervous Letter was setting up and then performing their own, Thane Truman was engaged in a frantic French Kiss adrenaline-fueled search for his beloved Fender acoustic guitar, which he was one hundred percent positive he had taken out of the Rabbit and placed on the sidewalk and then taken off the sidewalk and put in the little nook of the insurance company’s Nestor and Someone’s entryway next door to Huffington’s…but he was only ninety-nine percent sure that he had picked it up after he had come back from parking his car and carried it into the Green Room with the rest of his gear…Gaaa! Nervous Letter was blasting their way through a jingly-jangly selection of their most immaculate and saccharine compositions, which was saying a lot, and through all of it Thane tore around Huffington’s searching desperately for his guitar…it wasn’t in the little nook and it wasn’t by the bar or stuck under the table or hidden behind the enormous PA speakers on either side of the stage or under the golden halfmoon…it had gone to Croatan without having written (or played) a note…

…and during this period Lisa Dennis and Crimson Clover manned the stools still – Lisa was out (out out out out) of synapse butter and was free to sit still (or as still as someone who’s coked to the gills can sit) and drink Rainier and listen to CC point out which of the guys were closet queers, and, of these, which were tops and which were bottoms, as he called them – and when this got dull, he entertained them (mostly him) by reflecting out loud about which of the ladies were fuzz munchers, as he put it, and by this time both of them were quite drunk. CC had no problem yelling to be heard over the jinglejanglejinglejanglejingle bouncing around the room like colored elastic confetti, even when the objects of his speculation were within earshot and capable of reacting to his pronouncements with withering stares. And all this time Lisa and CC were also watching Thane coming and going and coming and going, checking under tables and behind chairs, checking checking checking like an obsessive compulsive trying to leave the house, forever searching for his guitar like a ghost for his lover, a corn-goddess for her daughter…

…and of course Thane was still being intercepted, being arrested, being apprehended, by first this fan, then this one, then this friend of an ex-girlfriend, then this one…he didn’t want to appear panicked, appear that anything, everything is/might be wrong (“They…they said they’re playing here tonight…” …wha’?)…so he’s still got to do the spiel if he hasn’t already run into them, practice the fine art of selling, selling not himself but the record, the beautiful record Vector with its glaring careless error courtesy of Dax, former bandmate (“How about the Thane Truman Band?”)…and by this time he’d lost all track of the girl Cassie/Cassady…make the spiel, sell the record, and then resume zooming from locus to hopeless locus in search of his guitar in its dour black coffin case. He barely had time to wonder about the brothers in the Green Room…said they’re third…

So engrossed was Thane in his quest that he failed to notice Nervous Letter was winding down – the singer, a slight future beardo in a pink T-shirt that said Pussy Patrol on it, had already abandoned the stage and was letting his bandmates vamp off by themselves in an extended coda. The bass player Sugarland, who had represented on the blunt, was really getting into it – he had his eyes closed and was swaying back and forth with an idiotic, beatific grin on his face. All of this was lost in Thane Truman, who was aware only of an impending sense of doom as his cardiac ventricles depolarized faster and contracted harder and faster and harder. He could taste his heart pounding in his breast as the guitar persisted in its absence…and then Nervous Letter was finished and started tearing down their gear…

At this point one of the young (black) men that Thane had encountered in the Green Room, a svelte, muscular fellow in an orange T-shirt, leapt gracefully onto the stage and pulled a microphone from the little clip that held it in place on the stand. He tapped its tip twice and the corresponding confirmatory THMM THMM over the PA pleased him immensely. He smiled at the teeming hordes before him and raised the bell of the microphone to his lips:

“A’ight, a’ight, we about to tear this shit up for real, a’ight, yeah!” he cried. And Pavey the sound guy was there too, onstage, passing out four more mikes…mikes for the other brothers…they were shaking hands and grinning at one another…

All at once a shout rose in unison from the crowd – it made Thane freeze..he was looking for his guitar in the Green Room again, dodging members of Nervous Letter who were carrying their gear backstage. What the hell was that? What was happening out there? Where was Samantha? Time to play!

“Hey,” a very panicky and sweaty Thane Truman said to Sugarland, who was still leering like a benign maniac. “Hey man – do you think your guitar player will let me use his guitar?” The guitar player in question overheard this and stopped doing what he was doing, which was scraping the last molecules of hummus out of its jade dish with the penultimate piece of pita bread, and instead began gesticulating wildly at Sugarland, shaking his head and swiping a single finger back and forth across his own throat to indicate that there was no fucking way in hell Sugarland should suggest his guitar might be available for use by Thane Truman or anyone else. Sugarland noted this and so did Thane, who saw him out of the corner of his eye, and turned on him. “C’mon man,” he said, a note of beggary creeping into his voice, “I think someone stole my guitar – someone walked off with it.” He raised his hands before him, palms up, fingers splayed with poverty. “I gotta go play. I gotta play.” And the guitar player, who had a long black forelock hanging across one eye like a parrot’s tailfeather, shook his head no again and shrugged.
“I don’t let nobody use my guitar,” he said.

At this point there was another round of sanguine cheering from the floor in response to something someone was yelling into the microphone. Whoever had the mike (Thane hadn’t seen him yet) was a real master of ceremonies – the crowd was getting positively frenetic…Time to play!

“I’m not nobody,” Thane yelled. “I’m Thane Truman!”

The guitar player rolled his eyes and responded by walking out of the Green Room – another act was starting. He’d heard some rap band was going to play.

Starting was not the word for it. Shit was exploding out there. The whole Southsyde Crue, the band Lisa and CC had booked, was on stage now, all five of them, and their main man Grover had just sent Pavey on break with a couple of joints and plugged the CD player into the PA and the sound of a very low-end drumbeat came over the speakers: BUMP BUMP-BUMP-KSSSSH BUMP BUMP-BUMP KSSSSH. The crowd was leaping up and down and bouncing from one foot to the other and cheering. The leader of the Crue, MC Dope Jammer, the one in the blue T-shirt, was huddled with his partners in the center of the stage, And then a sallow trumpet line rose over the dull thuds of the drum tracks and the five of separated and began lunging violently about the stage, anastrophing and catastrophing, raising their shoulders in exaggerated shrugs. And as Thane emerged from the Green Room behind them, MC Dope Jammer began his incantations:

Yes the Southsyde Crue is strictly T N P
So surrender at your peril
You can’t tame the feral
Can’t cut no cheddar in the DMZ
Pockets full of stuffing
Plus the chocolate in your cheeks
I got your ass in my sights
In the booty call lights
You light up my life like a dime piece freak
Brothers sneakin’ peeks but they can’t make bail
Read me your will then read me my rights
Success at the head, victory at the tail
Take a better hit and then
Pass that shit! Pass that shit!
Take a bigger hit and then
Pass that shit!


The rest of the Southcyde Crue had joined in on the pass that shit! bits and were jumping up and down with something like dirty schoolboy glee – the stage was going WHUMP WHUMP under the weight of so many perfect sneakers landing on it together in unison …

…and now the crowd was swaying like cobras, or kelp, their hands elevated high above their heads in hip hop rip rap rapture, and as Thane emerged from the Green Room, the sight of all those upturned faces, glistering with sweat and joy, moving to the beat as though blown by a viewless wind, black and white and black and white and black and white in turn, made Thane feel something he had never felt before…it was as though his whole world had been disassembled and packed into a shoe box, a sneaker box left over from the purchase of one of those virgin pairs of white kicks that graced the stage on the feet of the strophing usurpers (WHUMP WHUMP WHUMP), a box that was then sent sailing over the edge of one of the ocean-side cliffs in Dover, or Acapulco, to splash invisibly into the waters below and sink glugglugglugglugglug into the depths, never to be seen or heard from again…it was the emotion known as insignificance.

Take a gander at this pander makin’ deals on the side
He be macking with the merch cause his ass is too wide
Yeah a player need a ho’ like a rimmer need a ride
Long live the king ‘cause this shit is regicide

They all looked so happy – he could see Big Puffin standing against the wall and bobbing his head – Gracie BonBon was dancing – dancing! – looking for all the world like she was on spring break in Atlanta, tossing her ass (her BOO-tay!) this way and that and flailing her arms over her head…the Nordic ice twins Kanta and Punta were writhing around one another like lubricious albino eels while Dysfunction Junction looked on with approval…that runt Sugarland was doing some sort of hippie dance, wiggling his arms and shaking his head – and Thane could see Lisa Denise, or whatever her name was, and her friend, Mr. Laundry Head – that couldn’t possibly be his name! – swaying and laughing and swaying – and then he saw the rapturous upturned face of Cassady/Cassie/ the hot number from the RCW, mesmerized by the spectacle before her, and his shoebox buried itself a little deeper in the sand on the ocean floor.

Thane’s formerly Ptolemaic mind reeled like an experimental fighter plane flipping nose over tail, nose over tail, all control lost and never to be regained, bound for the rocky desert below…it was too much – Ivy and Dax, the missing guitar, the mistake on the record, no Samantha, and now these – these barbarians (Thane hated himself for thinking this, but only for a moment) that were occupying the stage…No! This evening was his! He’d bought and paid for it in blood and sweat and tears, with months of toiling away at writing the songs for Vector, practicing them, recording them (while saboteurs like Dax strove to compromise them), mixing them, mastering them, lovingly designing the cover, writing the liner notes, making flyers, sending out press kits, shelling out the $1875 for CD duping, emailing people, calling them, texting them, doing interviews (okay, an interview…)…and for what? So these…people could casually stroll onstage and shred his glory with their brutal onslaughts?

You can’t find the killer ‘cause your eyes are blood red
You woulda been better off hosting breakfast in bed
For the grayboys waiting in the wings, in the wings
Better catch the next flight overnight to bling-bling

And then something very unusual happened, which was that the whole montage, the whole field of kelp, the cobra farm, the quintet of usurpers still going WHUMP WHUMP on the stage with their jumping and their thumping, and the luminescent vaulted phosphorescent ceiling of Huffington’s vibrating with radioactive gloom, lost all color and became a black and white vision like an early gangster film – all color disappeared from the scene like it was being…sucked out of it…and this concurred with the sensation that someone had run a cable from his ass to the top of his head and was flooding it with umpteen thousand volts of electricity, as insignificance was alchemically transmuted into revenge with the philosopher’s stone of adrenaline and he saw himself, as though in a colorless dream, MARCHING onto the stage out of the shadows into history, now alive with electricity and rage.

Like a general Thane marched toward MC Dope Jammer, who was leading the chanting and incanting and charming, and reached over and before his target knew what was happening, he had plucked the microphone from his hand and stood there, confronting him. MC Dope Jammer looked confused but he didn’t do anything except back up a step or two and look at Thane warily. The other four members of the Southcyde Crue noticed this and stopped the shrugging and the leaping and the strophing and lowered their own microphones to the level of their xiphoid processes, watching to see what was going to happen next, retreating to the sides of the stage. This white dude looked totally crazed. In the glare of the lights out here it was harder to see the black and white kelp cobras but Thane had the distinct sensation that they, too, were watching and waiting. Only the CD player persisted in its shrill BUMP BUMP-BUMP BUMP KRSSHHH but then someone paused it and the great PA speakers fell still and silent. Thane Truman, triumphant, walked to the front of the stage, raised the microphone to his lips, and spoke into the silence, into the vaulted hall:

“Well!” he said. “That was a very enjoyable interlude, courtesy of our friends here.” He waved a hand backwards at the Southcyde Crue to compensate for not knowing their name. They stared at him like stone gods. “Thanks a lot, guys, really! Thank you! So, as you know, I’m Thane Truman, and this is my CD release show. In fact, I’ve got CDs for sale this very evening and I’d love it if you bought one, or ten.”

“Bullshit,” someone called out, but he ignored them.

“So, I’m going to set up a few things and get things moving here – we should be ready to go in a few minutes –” - or as soon as I find a guitar, whichever comes later, he thought ruefully – “ – so have a drink and tip the bartender and enjoy yourselves!”

“Bull-SHIT!” came the voice again. He scanned the crowd but the lights were still too bright to see very much. Who was yelling? Color was starting to return to the world like the universe had just invented it and was testing it out. Ahhhh…and then...

WHACK! Something hit him in the forehead, hard, and he saw little glowing rhombi and trapezoids dancing in his field of vision. Whatever it was fell to the stage with a thump. He bent over and looked at it. It was a porcelain dish to which bits of food residue, perhaps the world-famous Huffington’s macaroni and cheese dish, still clung. What the fuck? He heard snickers and sniggers from the rappers but he didn’t look at them. The color was starting to bleach out of everything again. Rage! “Bullshit!” the voice yelled, closer this time. It was coming right from the front of the stage. It was that guitar player, the one who wouldn’t let him borrow his guitar, with the stupid forelock hanging in one eye. He was leaning on the stage with both hands, aiming his ugly face right at Thane Truman. “Southcyde Crue!” he yelled. What was that?

A current of affirmation rippled through the crowd amidst much mumbling and grumbling. “Crue!” someone else yelled. “More hip hop!”

“No!” Thane said. His voice boomed around the room like he was running a concentration camp. “There is no more hip hop. That was just an interlude. Now we’re gonna –” He didn’t get to finish telling everyone what they were gonna do because another projectile – an empty beer bottle, a porter - came whizzing through the air and he ducked just in time to let it strike one of the Southcyde Crue members behind him, who went “Uhhhhhhh…” Thane didn’t back down but instead regarded the mob severely. “Whoever the fuck is throwing shit needs to knock it the fuck off right now,” he said, his voice now stuffed with rage.

He felt something down below – his leg! The guitar player for Nervous Letter had grabbed his leg and was tugging him forward, trying to pull him down into the seething masses. “Southcyde Crue!” someone yelled, a woman. Lisa? He thrashed his leg, trying to free it, but the prick held on. He pivoted around on his good leg and with a mighty jerk his leg was his again. The first thing he did with it was send his foot arcing forward into the guy’s face. Bullseye! Forelock fell back.
else
“Hey!” someone yelled, and then someone else was trying to grab his leg. What the fuck? This was like some horror movie. He tried the pivot-jerk move again but suddenly Forelock was leaping on stage – he knocked Thane over and the two of them tumbled to the floor of the stage in a heap. The microphone went skittering away and Thane caught a glimpse of the Southcyde Crue, if that was their name, staring intently at him and his sparring partner… He and Forelock rolled over one another one, twice, and then he was on his back again, Forelock straddling his thigh and raising a meaty forearm – where did some pale indie rocker get such big forearms? – and then he pounded Thane in the left eye, pounded him on the forehead. Thane struggled to get free and caught another blow on the ear. Over the PA Thane heard SKK SKK SKK as more microphones hit the floor, abandoned by the Crue…and then Forelock seemed to be rising off of him as though elevated by an invisible crane – the guy whose microphone he’s commandeered, MC Dope Jammer, had his arms locked around Forelock’s upper torso and was yanking him up off of Thane. Thane took advantage of this to try to strike Forelock in the chin - the angle was wrong and he caught him in the neck instead. Forelock started wheezing and gasping but he was still rising in the air, caught up in the invincible, undeniable arms of the leader of the Southcyde Crue.

“Maaaarrrrkkkkk!” a female voice howled, and suddenly there was a skinny brunette in a Here Kitty Kitty T-shirt clawing at him, clawing at Forelock – Mark? – she kicked Thane in the shoulder with one of her red high heels and he flipped over on his stomach to shield his groin…and then someone else, no, two someone elses, were pulling him up by his shoulders and he spied bright monochromatic T-shirts – two other members of the Southcyde Crue (Usurpers!) were pulling him to his feet and trying to ward off blows from the skinny blonde – was she Forelock’s girlfriend or something? He could feel his eye bloating and swelling – shit, it hurt so much! Another member of the Southcyde Crue had seized the blonde from behind and was trying to restrain her – and suddenly one, two, three, four more people from the audience were leaping on stage – it looked like two of them, two girls, were trying to pull the blonde free of her subduer, who regarded them with sad, ancient eyes – one of them, a curly haired wench in a skirt, had taken off one of her sneakers and was pounding the blonde’s keeper on the chest and the shoulders – she was too short to reach any higher – but he just held onto the struggling blonde tighter and stepped back. The two guys that had pulled Thane to his feet let him go and he cast his injured head about the stage at what felt like an imminent riot. Forelock was hanging limply in the arms of MC Dope Jammer, who appeared to have him in a full nelson…Two other guys, white guys who he didn’t know, were glowering at Thane him and looking like they wanted to throttle him but for his rescuers, his benefactors, the Southcyde Crue…and then there was a squeal of feedback and everyone clapped their hands over the ears, even the two guys holding Forelock and the blonde…Forelock fell to his knees on the stage while the blonde whirled around, her hand over her own ears…someone had picked up the microphone he had dropped when Forelock had attacked him…whoever it was standing in the center of the stage, silhouetted against the glaring blaring lights crashing down of them from all around…

“GET OFF THE STAGE! EVERYONE EXCEPT FOR THANE GET OFF THE FUCKING STAGE!” the silhouette boomed.

It was Samantha, on the mike.

“WHOEVER ISN’T OFF THE FUCKING STAGE IN THE NEXT TEN SECONDS IS GOING TO GET MACED! I AM NOT FUCKING KIDDING. THIS IS MY FUCKING CLUB AND IF YOU DON’T WANT TO LISTEN TO ME YOU CAN DEAL WITH THE POLICE WHEN THEY GET HERE! I WILL MACE ALL YOU FUCKERS IN THE FUCKING EYEBALLS!”

The five members of the Southcyde Crue, who, Thane was forced to admit, had pretty much saved his ass, exchanged glances and slunk away toward the Green Room. Forelock and the blonde looked stunned but they, too, skulked down the stairs at the side of the stage. The crowd was all murmurs and whispering. “Bullshit,” someone called out, without much heart. The curly-haired wench hopped off the stage, still holding her sneaker, and her friend, who had a nice ass, followed suit. The others, the two male newcomers, looked undecided. Samantha took a step toward them, brandishing – shit, she really did have a can of mace! It was an evil-looking little black thing. And then they too split and it was just he and Samantha left on the stage.

“Thane!” a whispery, intense voice said by the edge of the stage. “Is this yours?” It was a stunned-looking Sugarland, holding Thane’s dour coffin-like guitar case against his chest with both arms. Thane bent down to retrieve it. “I just found it in the bathroom,” Sugarland said.

The bathroom? “Thank you, thank you,” Thane said, meaning it. “Thank you.”

“NOW LISTEN,” Samantha was yelling into the mike. “THIS IS THANE TRUMAN’S FUCKING CD RELEASE PARTY AND HE’S GOING TO PLAY FOR US NOW. THERE WAS AN ERROR WITH THE BOOKING BUT IT’S STRAIGHTENED OUT NOW. SO LET’S TRY TO HAVE A GOOD TIME.” Samantha could see Lisa Dennis smirking at her, about ten feet from the stage. “AND YOU, YOU CUNT,” Samantha said, pointing directly at Lisa Dennis, whose smirk vaporized instantly, “YOU AND I HAVE SOME BUSINESS TO ATTEND TO. THE CAT IS OUT OF THE BAG AND YOU HAVE NOTHING TO USE AGAINST ME NOW, YOU BITCH, YOU CUNT, YOU FUCKING FAT SKANKY PIECE OF SHIT.” This was a little irrational, airing her dirty laundry, albeit encrypted, over the PA and before a full house (well, half full - lots of people were leaving), but she couldn’t help herself. The look on the cunt’s face was worth it. Lisa was looking right at her so she mouthed the words YOU’RE FUCKING DEAD FUCKING DEAD at her. Lisa recoiled and started backing away, snaking through the crowd toward the door. She was going after her, she was sure of that. Everything was out in the open – Dimer Brzezowski, the gay prostitutes her husband had been patronizing for the last six months – it had all been food for thought on the Owens’ confessional dinner table that evening. The outcome of their marriage was uncertain, but two things were very certain: the thawed mammoth was dead, dead, dead, laying flat on its back with its limbs splayed and a spear stuck in its viscera, and the skank was going be dead shortly, or at least maimed beyond recognition. She grinned. She was looking forward to it. She walked over to a very shaken-looking Thane and said, “Here you go, champ.” She handed him the microphone. And with that she leapt off the stage in pursuit of her quarry. The mammoth-killer vanished in the crowd.

“Thane,” came the whispery voice again. It was Sugarland. This time he was on the stage, pulling an amplifier. It was Thane’s own – he must have gotten it from the Green Room. “Here,” Sugarland said. He tossed Thane a quarter-inch cable and plugged the other end into the amplifier.

“Thank you,” Thane said. “Thank you.” His eye hurt like…like the dickens. He wondered how much more it would hurt once the drinks wore off.

Sugarland pulled a microphone stand out of the shadows and slid it toward Thane. “Hurry up,” he said. “People are leaving.”

They were. The place was half-empty and emptying more by the moment, like a bathtub with too many drains. Threats, bad vibes, boredom – why were they leaving? Bah. Sheep. Then Thane noticed someone standing at the edge of the stage, watching him. It was the cookie from the RCW. She gave Thane what looked like her special encouraging smile. Thane returned it. He wondered how he looked with his eye all swollen. Hopefully he looked tough. How much of it had she seen? She wondered if she’d seen him try to clip Forelock on the chin. He hoped so. He imagined himself kissing her neck, the top of her breasts, her areolae.

There was no time for the delay pedals, for the sweepers, for the keyboards. It was going to be bareback – just him and his guitar, like the old days! That was it! Back to the beat! Thane put the microphone stand erect and snapped the mike into its little plastic clip. He bent over to open the guitar case, watching the crowd dissipate. Let them. This wasn’t music for sheep. It was –

The case flipped open, and there, instead of the acoustic guitar on which he’d written Vector and played all his shows for the last six years, was a small, sooty-looking, stuffed toy goat.

14.
Later that night, on the way to the emergency room at Charity Faith Hospital, CC noticed Lisa Dennis’ blood had so saturated the scarf she was holding over her nose that it was dripping into her lap and all over the seat.

“Heeeyyy,” he said from the driver’s seat. “Watch it with that. This isn’t a fucking ambulance.” He was pissed. He’d hoped they’d have a good laugh at the show, get drunk, and maybe he’d score some skinny white boy.

“Oh, I’m so sorry I’m fucking bleeding to death and ruining your car,” she said. This was a bit of an exaggeration. She had a broken nose and a couple of black eyes but she was far from death, far from it. Too bad, thought CC.

“Try to drip out the window or something,” CC said crossly.

“Ok, Dr. Assrammer,” Lisa said. She didn’t move to open the window so CC did it for her, electronically, from the driver’s side.

“It’s fucking cold,” Lisa said. “Close the fucking window.”

“Okay,” CC said. “But tell me one thing first, ok?”

Lisa didn’t answer him.

“If it wasn’t personal,” CC said, “why did you do it?”

“Would you just close the fucking window?” Lisa said. “You want me to show up with frostbite, too?”

“Why did you do it?” CC asked again, with perfect singularity of vision.

Lisa sighed like…well, it wasn’t like anything, it was just a deep, melodramatic, exasperated sigh. “I told you, he’s an asshole.”

CC frowned. “But not to you.”

“What difference does it make?” Lisa said. “Would you just close it? Your mouth and the fucking window.”

“So you did this because he’s an asshole in general?”

Lisa nodded. “If someone’s an asshole, they deserve to get shit on,” she said. The anatomical incongruity of this aphorism didn’t seem to phase her. She bled and bled.

CC shrugged. “So you took it upon yourself to punish him for being an asshole in general, but not to you specifically?”

“What, am I on trial here?” Lisa said. “Who cares?”

“Not me,” said CC. “What happened when you went out with him?”

Lisa emitted a long, exasperated, irritating sigh. “You keep asking me that,” she said. “He – he just wasn’t interested.”

“Wasn’t interested?”

“He. Wasn’t. Interested. In. Me,” Lisa said emphatically.

“And you were into him, huh?” said CC. “Is that what all this is about? Unrequited love?”

Lisa glowered at the glove compartment and said nothing.
“And what was the point of that whole thing, anyway?” CC asked. “Having the Southcyde Crue show up?”

Shrug.

“I mean, what did you expect to have happen?” CC pressed on.

“I don’t know,” Lisa said sullenly. “Everything. Nothing. Chaos.”

“Chaos?” CC echoed.

“Pretty much,” Lisa said. “Which is what happened.”

“So you figured you’d have them show up to play and – what? There’d be a riot or something? The brothers start whipping out gats when they’re told they can’t play?”

“Something like that,” Lisa said. “I didn’t think about it that much, if you fucking need to know, Perry Mason.”

CC snorted. “I guess you didn’t think about it that much. You just got lucky with the guitar thing, though, huh?”

“Enough of this shit. Fuck off. I need to get some coke,” Lisa whined. In the distance the bright towers of Charity Faith loomed. “Hurry up. And roll up the window, you fucking fag.”

Instead CC slowed the car to a crawl, then a stop. He put it in park and opened his door and got out and then walked around to the other side and opened Lisa Dennis’ door.

She looked up at him. “What the fuck are you doing?” she said.

He reached over and picked up her purse from the floor of the car.

“Heeeey!” she yelled. “What are you doing, you fucking...” She didn’t get to finish the sentence because CC had opened her purse and was dumping its contents on the side of the road – tampons, a cellphone, makeup stuff, receipts, straws, little empty baggies. He shook it and shook it until nothing else fell out.

Lisa leapt up from the seat, still clutching her bloody scarf. “You fucking nig-”

Before could finish the word CC hit her once, in her already-broken nose. She screeched and sank to the ground, and then screeched again. There was blood all over the front of her sweatshirt, all over her face. It poured off her into the street where it ran in little rivulets downhill.

CC walked back around to the other side of the car, got it, and put it in drive. He did a U-turn and passed Lisa, who was still crouched in the dirt, sobbing and howling AIEIEIEIEIEIEIE... He turned on the radio so he wouldn’t have to hear her as he drove away. It was Baby Earthling. He loved Baby Earthling. He hummed along.

It was only about one in the morning. Still time to go back downtown and try to hook up. “If someone’s an asshole…” he thought to himself. He liked that. He liked it a lot. Nothing personal.

June 2009