Rock On (62 page)

Though in the years to come I was to think of his suicide as simply that—a man drowning himself, a sorrowful occurrence but nothing momentous—at the time he seemed a fabulous presence, and I half-expected a sign of his passing to appear in the sky or some great moan to be dredged up from the sea. But there was only the wind and the surf as always, and neither Darcy nor I went to the edge to see if he had surfaced. We sat in the lee of the dancehall, sheltering from the wind, which had suddenly picked up. We didn’t talk much, just things like, “You warm enough?” and such. The longer I sat, the worse I felt. Roy John Harlow had wanted death, had acted of his own will, but who was to say he had known what was best, and hadn’t I—by helping him—exerted as much influence as I might have if I had refused? The ripples of his death spread through my thoughts, magnifying them, until the event took on a complexity and importance that wouldn’t fit inside my head, and I was left numb and hollow-feeling. Soon the sky began to pink, crimson streaks fanned across the horizon, and the tide turned. We climbed down the pilings and jumped into the cold water; we caught a comber and body-surfed toward shore, barreling straight for the facade of the Joyland Arcade, with its sun-bleached image of a goofy clown melting up from the gray light. I scraped my knee on the coquina-shell bottom and was almost grateful for the pain.

We stood on the beach, dazed, not knowing what to do next. Going home didn’t make any sense after the night we’d had. Darcy fingered the zipper of the waterproof bag; she pulled it open, then she dropped the bag and started to cry. I hugged her, trying to give her comfort; but the comforting soon evolved into a kiss, and I was cupping her breast, and she was grinding her hips against me. Pa had told me not to hope for too much my first time with Darcy, that our nervousness and inexperience might make it more problematic than pleasurable; but our need for each other was so powerful that our anxieties were washed away, and it was perfect between us. And afterward, lying with my arms around her, our bodies crusted with sand, I felt that I had gotten clear of whatever wrongness there had been, that our lovemaking had been a spell worked contrary to the intricate sadness of the night. I was entranced by the sight of Darcy’s body, which though I’d seen it often, had acquired a heightened gloss, a freshly matured beauty.

Sunrise flamed higher, a towering city of clouds pierced by sharply defined rays and mounted against a banded backdrop of mauve and crimson and gold. It was such a vivid, burning sky, it didn’t seem that anything as old and ordinary as day would follow, that those colors would only deepen and grow richer, and for a moment I think I believed that the day would not follow, that with the death of Roy John Harlow and his music, something had been freed, some last smoke of the gone world faded, some change come full, and what passed for day would from now on and forever be something else, something new and green and hopeful, with its own music to suit. Maybe I was wrong, but it didn’t matter. I turned again to Darcy, and—as the sun began to warm my back and seagulls mewed, wheeling above the ancient pier and the dancehall, looking dilapidated in that brimstone light—I moved with her in a sweet hectic celebration of what we had lost, and what we loved, and what we did not understand.

Lucius Shepard
earned his living as a rock musician in and around Detroit for almost a decade. Stories like this are informed by his journey through the outlying precincts of the music business, a time he now views as a kind of affliction. His fiction has been awarded many honors including the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards. Forthcoming is a new collection,
Five Autobiographies,
and a novel,
The End of Life as We Know It.

The Big Flash

Norman Spinrad

T minus 200 days . . . and counting . . . 

They came on freaky for my taste—but that’s the name of the game: freaky means a draw in the rock business. And if the Mandala was going to survive in LA, competing with a network-owned joint like The American Dream, I’d just have to hold my nose and out-freak the opposition. So after I had dug the Four Horsemen for about an hour, I took them into my office to talk turkey.

I sat down behind my Salvation Army desk (the Mandala is the world’s most expensive shoestring operation) and the Horsemen sat down on the bridge chairs sequentially, establishing the group’s pecking order.

First the head honcho, lead guitar and singer, Stony Clarke—blond shoulder-length hair, eyes like something in a morgue when he took off his steel-rimmed shades, a reputation as a heavy acid-head and the look of a speed-freak behind it. Then Hair, the drummer, dressed like a Hell’s Angel, swastikas and all, a junkie, with fanatic eyes that were a little too close together, making me wonder whether he wore swastikas because he grooved behind the Angel thing or made like an Angel because it let him groove behind the swastika in public. Number three was a cat who called himself Super Spade and wasn’t kidding—he wore earrings, natural hair, a Stokely Carmichael sweatshirt, and on a thong around his neck a shrunken head that had been whitened with liquid shoe polish. He was the utility infielder: sitar, bass, organ, flute, whatever. Number four, who called himself Mr. Jones, was about the creepiest cat I had ever seen in a rock group, and that is saying something. He was their visuals, synthesizer, and electronics man. He was at least forty, wore Early Hippy clothes that looked like they had been made by Sy Devore, and was rumored to be some kind of Rand Corporation dropout. There’s no business like show business.

“Okay, boys,” I said, “you’re strange, but you’re my kind of strange. Where you worked before?”

“We ain’t, baby,” Clarke said. “We’re the New Thing. I’ve been dealing crystal and acid in the Haight. Hair was drummer for some plastic group in New York. The Super Spade claims it’s the reincarnation of Bird and it don’t pay to argue. Mr. Jones, he don’t talk too much. Maybe he’s a Martian. We just started putting our thing together.”

One thing about this business, the groups that don’t have square managers, you can get cheap. They talk too much.

“Groovy,” I said. “I’m happy to give you guys your start. Nobody knows you, but I think you got something going. So I’ll take a chance and give you a week’s booking. One a.m. to closing, which is two, Tuesday through Sunday, four hundred a week.”

“Are you Jewish?” asked Hair.

“What?”

“Cool it,” Clarke ordered. Hair cooled it. “What it means,” Clarke told me, “is that four hundred sounds like pretty light bread.”

“We don’t sign if there’s an option clause,” Mr. Jones said.

“The Jones-thing has a good point,” Clarke said. “We do the first week for four hundred, but after that it’s a whole new scene, dig?”

I didn’t feature that. If they hit it big, I could end up not being able to afford them. But on the other hand $400 was light bread, and I needed a cheap closing act pretty bad.

“Okay,” I said. “But a verbal agreement that I get first crack at you when you finish the gig.”

“Word of honor,” said Stony Clarke.

That’s this business—the word of honor of an ex-dealer and speed-freak.

T minus 199 days . . . and counting . . .

Being unconcerned with ends, the military mind can be easily manipulated, easily controlled, and easily confused. Ends are defined as those goals set by civilian authority. Ends are the conceded province of civilians; means are the province of the military, whose duty it is to achieve the ends set for it by the most advantageous application of the means at its command.

Thus the confusion over the war in Asia among my uniformed clients at the Pentagon. The end has been duly set: eradication of the guerrillas. But the civilians have overstepped their bounds and meddled in means. The Generals regard this as unfair, a breach of contract, as it were. The Generals (or the faction among them most inclined to paranoia) are beginning to see the conduct of the war, the political limitation on means, as a ploy of the civilians for performing a putsch against their time-honored prerogatives.

This aspect of the situation would bode ill for the country, were it not for the fact that the growing paranoia among the Generals has enabled me to manipulate them into presenting both my scenarios to the President. The President has authorized implementation of the major scenario, provided that the minor scenario is successful in properly molding public opinion.

My major scenario is simple and direct. Knowing that the poor flying weather makes our conventional airpower, with its dependency on relative accuracy, ineffectual, the enemy has fallen into the pattern of grouping his forces into larger units and launching punishing annual offensives during the monsoon season. However, these larger units are highly vulnerable to tactical nuclear weapons, which do not depend upon accuracy for effect. Secure in the knowledge that domestic political considerations preclude the use of nuclear weapons, the enemy will once again form into division-sized units or larger during the next monsoon season. A parsimonious use of tactical nuclear weapons, even as few as twenty 100 kiloton bombs, employed simultaneously and in an advantageous pattern, will destroy a minimum of 200,000 enemy troops, or nearly two-thirds of his total force, in a twenty-four hour period. The blow will be crushing.

The minor scenario, upon whose success the implementation of the major scenario depends, is far more sophisticated, due to its subtler goal: public acceptance of, or, optimally, even public clamor for, the use of tactical nuclear weapons. The task is difficult, but my scenario is quite sound, if somewhat exotic, and with the full, if to-some-extent-clandestine support of the upper military hierarchy, certain civil government circles and the decision-makers in key aerospace corporations, the means now at my command would seem adequate. The risks, while statistically significant, do not exceed an acceptable level.

T minus 189 days . . . and counting . . . 

The way I see it, the network deserved the shafting I gave them. They shafted me, didn’t they? Four successful series I produce for those bastards, and two bomb out after thirteen weeks and they send me to the salt mines! A discotheque, can you imagine they make me producer at a lousy discotheque! A remittance man they make me, those schlockmeisters. Oh, those schnorrers made The American Dream sound like a kosher deal—twenty percent of the net, they say. And you got access to all our sets and contract players, it’ll make you a rich man, Herm. And like a yuk, I sign, being broke at the time, without reading the fine print. I should know they’ve set up The American Dream as a tax loss? I should know that I’ve
gotta
use their lousy sets and stiff contract players and have it written off against my gross? I should know their shtick is to run The American Dream at a loss and then do a network TV show out of the joint from which I don’t see a penny? So I end up running the place for them at a paper loss, living on salary, while the network rakes it in off the TV show that I end up paying for out of my end.

Don’t bums like that deserve to be shafted? It isn’t enough they use me as a tax loss patsy, they gotta tell me who to book! “Go sign the Four Horsemen, the group that’s packing them in at the Mandala,” they say. “We want them on
A Night With The American Dream.
They’re hot.”

“Yeah, they’re hot,” I say, “which means they’ll cost a mint, I can’t afford it.”

They show me more fine print—next time I read the contract with a microscope. I
gotta
book whoever they tell me to and I gotta absorb the cost on my books! It’s enough to make a Litvak turn anti-Semite.

So I had to go to the Mandala to sign up these hippies. I made sure I didn’t get there till 12:30 so I wouldn’t have to stay in that nuthouse any longer than necessary. Such a dive! What Bernstein did was take a bankrupt Hollywood club on the Strip, knock down all the interior walls and put up this monster tent inside the shell. Just thin white screening over two-by-fours. Real shlock. Outside the tent, he’s got projectors, lights, speakers, all the electronic mumbo-jumbo, and inside is like being surrounded by movie screens. Just the tent and the bare floor, not even a real stage, just a platform on wheels they shlepp in and out of the tent when they change groups.

So you can imagine he doesn’t draw exactly a class crowd. Not with The American Dream up the street being run as a network tax loss. What they get is the smelly hard-core hippies I don’t let in the door and the kind of j.d. high-school kids that think it’s smart to hang around putzes like that. A lot of dope-pushing goes on. The cops don’t like the place and the rousts draw professional troublemakers.

A real den of iniquity—I felt like I was walking onto a Casbah set. The last group had gone off and the Horsemen hadn’t come on yet, so what you had was this crazy tent filled with hippies, half of them on acid or pot or amphetamine or for all I know Ajax, high-school would-be hippies, also mostly stoned and getting ugly, and a few crazy schwartzers looking to fight cops. All of them standing around waiting for something to happen, and about ready to make it happen. I stood near the door, just in case. As they say: “The vibes were making me uptight.”

All of a sudden the house lights go out and it’s black as a network executive’s heart. I hold my hand on my wallet—in this crowd, tell me there are no pickpockets. Just the pitch black and dead silence for what, ten beats, and then I start feeling something, I don’t know, like something crawling along my bones, but I know it’s some kind of subsonic effect and not my imagination, because all the hippies are standing still and you don’t hear a sound.

Then from monster speakers so loud you feel it in your teeth, a heartbeat, but heavy, slow, half-time like maybe a whale’s heart. The thing crawling along my bones seems to be synchronized with the heartbeat and I feel almost like I am that big dumb heart beating there in the darkness.

Then a dark red spot—so faint it’s almost infrared—hits the stage which they have wheeled out. On the stage are four uglies in crazy black robes—you know, like the Grim Reaper wears—with that ugly red light all over them like blood. Creepy. Boom-ba-boom. Boom-ba-boom. The heartbeat still going, still that subsonic bone-crawl and the hippies are staring at the Four Horsemen like mesmerized chickens.