Silk (11 page)

Next day, after he’d heard that Jonesy was seriously looking for someone to replace him on a not-so-temporary basis, he’d volunteered Daria. She’d told him to fuck off, but he’d begged, and Jonesy had finally agreed to let her sit in on
one
practice. Yer Funeral had rehearsed in the garage of an abandoned Chevron station, concrete floors gritty oil-dark and darker pits where the hydraulic lifts had been. Pablo had sat alone in a shadowy corner, sucking beer and looking sullen and anxious; Jonesy and Carlton had exchanged doubtful smirks as she’d tuned and adjusted the strap to fit her shoulder.

Then Carlton had started off, no warning, three loud beats slammed from his foot drum before Jonesy leaped into the New York Dolls’ “Chatterbox,” spitting the words at the mike and his graceless fingers ripping madly at his guitar. Daria had only missed a beat or two, and by the time they reached Jonesy’s solo, both drummer and singer were grinning. Daria had never looked up from the bass, never once taken her eyes off the strings, had chewed her lower lip until it bled, until the song had ended and Jonesy was laughing like a hyena and Carlton had kept repeating “Gawddammit, girl,” over and over. Pablo hadn’t said a word, had popped the cap off another bottle of Sterling and watched from his patch of gloom.

Daria had followed straight through Yer Funeral’s entire borrowed repertoire, had ended with “Rockaway Beach,” and her fingers had been numb, fingerprint whorls scraped raw and smooth. No breath left in her, gasping and her arms gone to slinkys, her sweat standing out on the garage floor around her feet, bright droplets and splatters unable to soak into the oil-and antifreeze-saturated cement. And Jonesy had slapped her on the back, big, stupid boy gesture of affection or camaraderie, fraternity, and then he’d hugged her tight, and Pablo, drunk off his cheap beer and confusion, knowing that this whole thing was getting way out of hand, blowing up in his face, but not sure why or how to stop the explosion, had mumbled something not entirely to himself.

Jonesy had asked him to speak up, come again, and Pablo had stood, slight reel and sway as he stepped toward them.

“What the hell difference does it make,” he’d slurred. Jonesy and Carlton had looked back at him with blank faces, not following; Daria had kept her eyes on the grungy floor, on her rejected sweat and abused fingers.

“No freakin’ scout wants to hear a cover band anyway, man. Punk’s dead and you guys are pissin’ up a goddamn rope.” And then he’d staggered off to take a leak, to hunt down the toilet even though the station hadn’t had water since it’d closed.

“Hey, fuck you, man,” Carlton had shouted after him. “You fucking wanker. You’re just pissed ’cause your old lady made you look like shit.”

Pablo had ignored him, had disappeared through a darkened doorway (the door torn off long ago, propped useless somewhere nearby) into the darker lobby. A second later, he’d cursed, had given up his search for the toilet, and they’d heard the metal-through-fabric
zrrrip,
the wet spatter of Pablo’s piss on the lobby’s tiles.

“Fuck him,” Jonsey muttered as he’d lit a cigarette and stuffed his Zippo back into his shirt pocket. “That was some amazing shit, Dar.”

Daria had wiped her face on the tail of her T-shirt, the clean ocean smell of her sweat mixing with the lingering gasoline stench, hydrocarbon phantoms, and she’d finally smiled. She
had
been good, damn good, and what’s more, it had
felt
good. Had felt wild and alive and had consumed her, every fiber of her mind and body, in a way that not even the best of her infrequent orgasms had ever come close to doing. She’d been only dimly aware of a door slamming somewhere, the rust-bucket growl of Pablo’s Impala outside the garage bay doors, the angry, hot spin of rubber on asphalt as he’d peeled out of the Chevron’s parking lot into the night.

“Don’t worry about it,” Carlton had said, “He’s bein’ a jerk.”

But she hadn’t
cared
about Pablo, felt only the vaguest annoyance, disappointment that he could be so insecure, could act so petty. Her head was crammed too full of the Gibson’s toothache throb, her senses clogged with the stinging numb of her fingertips, the delicious threat of cramp in her arms and shoulders and the small of her back, the heady smell of herself. And what she’d said next had spilled out like someone else’s words, no thought, no consideration of consequence or her own possible inadequacies.

“If I wrote some songs—I mean, the lyrics—can you guys write the music?”

Jonesy and Carlton had looked at each other, slug-slow comprehension, and then Jonesy had shaken his head.

“Forget it, Dar. Shit, even if I thought I could, there’s not enough time.”

“But would you
try,
Jonesy?” And that enthusiasm had felt strange coming from her mouth, alien vomit, shimmering silver and red in the amp-shocked garage air. “Would you at least give it a shot?”

“Why? We’re good, right?
Twice
as good with you on Pablo’s bass.”

“Because Pablo’s right, man,” Carlton had said, grudging agreement, as he began to break down his kit. “He might be a jerk, but he’s pro’bly right about nobody wantin’ to hear a bunch of tired old covers.”

“Just let me see what I can come up with,” she’d said, had almost been begging and no idea why, and they’d agreed, Jonesy still shaking his head, but agreeing anyway. Carlton had given her a ride home, and she’d looked for Pablo’s car on the street, had looked without letting on that she was looking. But there’d been no sign of him, no sign inside that he’d been back by the apartment.

Daria had called in sick the next day, had lied to her jowly-fat asshole of a manager, something simple and contagious like the flu or a stomach virus. She’d coughed into the receiver, had ground her voice down to the croakiest wheeze, and of course he hadn’t believed her. He handled his little legion of burger-flippers like an Egyptian foreman, building his pyramids from Styrofoam and beef patties; but he couldn’t prove she was slacking, would make it up by sticking her with all the shitty shifts for the next two weeks.

She’d found an old steno pad hiding on top of the refrigerator, half the pages filled with phone numbers and doodles, games of hangman, the cardboard cover crusted with specks of cockroach poop. She’d used one of their two butter knives to scrape the cover relatively clean and had spent the next fifteen minutes looking for a pencil, or a pen that hadn’t dried up.

Before nightfall, she’d finished her first song, “Iron Lung” scribbled like a prescription across the top of the page. Rambling and craggy, and it hadn’t felt anywhere near as good as the music had, had left only a dim sense of accomplishment and fingers smudged inky blue from the free-bleeding ballpoint pen. And the fear, almost certainty, that she’d been full of shit, that she should have kept her mouth shut, that Jonesy was gonna take one look at the words she’d scrawled and laugh in her face.

Before she’d gone to the bathroom sink to scrub the ink stains from her hands, to the boxy shower to scrub the previous night’s sweatgrunge away, she’d stood a minute or two at the window, watching Twenty-first Street, pockmarked asphalt stripe up and down the side of Red Mountain. Pablo could be anywhere, drunk or just moping; he’d drag his ass home sooner or later. She should be used to his punker boy bullshit and posing, but the guilt was starting to get in around the bright, new edges of her excitement.

And she’d realized that what she was
really
beginning to fear wasn’t that she might have driven something irreparable between her and Pablo, but the fact that the ecstasy and burn she’d felt with Jonesy and Carlton was temporary. That there would be only just so many fixes before Pablo’s hand came out of that cast and she went back to being peripheral, hanger-on, the girlfriend who paid bills and sat, smoking and drinking beer in bar after identical murky bar, while the others took the stage.

But Pablo had stayed gone, three more days and her words had fitted seamlessly with the crude, growling melodies Jonsey had fashioned for them. It was darker stuff than the fuck-off-and-die anthems Yer Funeral had always pushed. Darker and more urgent, and the thrill that Daria had felt that first night had been nothing compared to the rush that came from playing the new songs,
her
songs. Her fingers had become more sure by the minute, both of themselves and the strings, more like remembering than learning. And she’d loved the rawness of the lyrics, the way they rode high on the music, even if she’d still thought that Jonesy McCabe sounded like a raccoon caught in a washing machine.

Saturday night had come around and still no Pablo, no sign or word if he’d left town or gone to ground somewhere. The excitement had begun to sour in her stomach, intoxication curdled like old milk. They’d been slated as the first of two opening acts, had sat back in the shadows, staring out at the two or three hundred people milling around inside the derelict Northside warehouse.

“He ain’t gonna show,” Carlton had said, disgust and nerves competing for his voice.

“Fuck him,” Jonesy had replied. “Ain’t that right, Dar?
We’re
the show now, and tonight we’re gonna kick some ass.”

Daria hadn’t said anything, had scanned the scattered, shifting sea of faces, and she’d known he was out there somewhere. And that they weren’t lovers anymore, that she’d stolen something from him, and that, as far as Pablo was concerned, she may as well have sliced off his dick. She held his bass in her hands, sweatslicking the instrument’s long neck, and she’d wanted to call it off, go back, but it’d already been too late. Because she wanted
this
more, wanted this more than his cock between her legs or his body next to her in bed.

Someone had turned up the lights, gel bloodied red, sunlight at the bottom of a shallow red lake, and the crowd had all but disappeared behind the glare. Jonesy had put his arm around her shoulder, then, one-of-the-boys-now embrace, and she’d stepped through the stageside snarl of cables and Peavy amps.

The crowd had made a sound like some huge, mumbling beast, delight or dissent and a smattering of indifferent applause. Someone had hurled a beer can, and it had passed just inches from her face, drenching everything in foamy, malt-smelly stickiness.

“FUCK
YOU,
SHITHEADS!” Jonesy had howled into his mike, beer in his hair, dripping down his face, every muscle in his neck strained cord-taut. And
then
the crowd had come alive, big beast waking up, and
Blam, Blam, Blam,
three beats from Carlton, and she’d taken her eyes off the hazy writhe and press of bodies at the edge of the stage, no room for anything but the business of her fingers.

A showy little riff from Jonesy, a little too showy, and then he’d hurtled her words into the steel-gray phallus of the microphone, and the sound had poured out thick and sizzling around her, glorious wail and crash and backwash feedback.

Halfway through the first song, she’d tossed her head to one side, flipping hair from her eyes, had only looked away from the strings for a second, but she’d seen him. Pablo, eyes like anthracite lumps of coal, face like weathered cemetery marble. One violently still point in the fury of the mosh pit.

“All you make me feel is depressed,”
Jonesy sang.
“I’m tired of toeing your line.”

Pablo had stepped forward, not the slightest change in his expression, his utter absence of expression; the slamming flesh had parted freely as he came, Charlton Heston dividing meat with zombie eyes.

“Let me out of this iron lung! I can fuckin’ breathe on my own!”

He’d made it to the edge of the stage before Jonesy had noticed him, and there’d been no security down front, no security in the whole place except for one off-duty cop checking IDs at the door. And the door may as well have been a million miles away. Someone had turned on the strobes just then, and the red light had begun to pulse madly, arrhythmia flicker, as Pablo pulled himself up, pushed aside and between the monitors. He’d moved slow, and the lights had added the illusion of silent-film jerkiness.

Daria had taken one step back, her hands stumbling as the music came apart like a house of cards.

The crowd had shouted stupid encouragement, this new show as good as anything else, and Pablo hadn’t even blinked when another beer can had bounced off the back of his head.

“Hey, man, we’ll talk about this
after
the show,” and Jonesy had laid one hand firmly on Pablo’s shoulder. “Okay? ’Cause you’re just gonna make an asshole outta yourself this way,” but those empty, dark eyes had stayed locked on Daria.

“Give it
back
to me,” and everything that hadn’t been in his gaze was coiled tight and hot inside those words. He’d held both hands out for the bass, his right still encased in dirty plaster, looking more like a zombie than ever, Frankenstein’s vengeful monster come to collect his due.

“You don’t even know these songs, man,” and Jonesy had stepped away from his mike, had moved quickly to put himself between her and Pablo.

“It’s mine and I
said
give it back to me,
you goddamn stinking bitch,
” and Pablo had shrugged free of Jonesy’s grip, had shoved him aside and lunged for the Gibson so fast that Daria hadn’t had time to get out of his way. He’d grabbed the bass and yanked hard; the strap had held, but Daria stumbled, had lost her balance and gone down on her knees at his feet. The canvas strap had twisted up and under her chin, digging deep into her windpipe, cutting her breath off as it pulled her head around until she’d stared helplessly into Pablo’s crotch. Her hands struggled to unhook the strap, desperate fingers still stinging from the last notes of the interrupted song.