Up Jumps the Devil (19 page)

“Jesus
Christ
, dude!” gasped Fish. “What was the point of
that
?”

The Devil climbed out, jumped into his Bermudas, and headed for the cabana.

“You figure it out,” he said. “Happy birthday.”

FOR A FEW WEEKS
after Fish's birthday, the high rollers at the Chicago office noticed a change. Fish was seen studying actuarial tables. He even held a daylong meeting about statistics, and produced a startling example of an account he, himself, had handled.

“There was a guy in Cleveland,” he told them all, including Mr. Scratch, sitting in the back, wearing sunglasses, “who smoked and drank like there was no tomorrow, ate nothing but red meat, and had spinal meningitis as a child. But I added in his hat size and divided by the width of his wife's ass and multiplied the quotient by the kind of car he drives, and figured out that this guy was going to live to be ninety-eight fucking years old. We would have taken a bath. So I denied him coverage. We saved a quarter of a million projected, and didn't cost this fellow a dime either. Saving money is making money in this business, and no one got hurt. That's the kind of people we are, guys.”

Applause.

Even the mysterious Mr. Scratch, in the back, was seen to nod approval (and he
did
approve! He was surprised and pleased. Fish was growing! What he had done wasn't nice, it wasn't visionary, but at least it was intelligent, something that had been missing thus far).

It didn't last. A month later, Fish called a meeting to discuss a new idea.

“Bill everybody twice,” he commanded. “Some of those rubes will pay twice.”

Mr. Scratch shook his head.

Fish was observed to strut back to his office and pour himself a strong one, and toast himself in a great big mirror.

Various cities, stages, highways, drug-fueled parties,
and one very cool tree house, 1971

AFTER THE SOLD-OUT
St. Louis show, the fans started out far away, across the parking lot, restrained by cops and wooden barriers. Memory waved at them. William Tell, the drummer, tried to show them his dick, but one of the bodyguards got to him in time.

Purple Airplane's bodyguards—Jerry, Gus, and Pig—were three jolly monsters whose job was to keep the band out of trouble. They could drink, snort, and smoke more than the band members, so that even when the good times got crazy, the bodyguards were always clearheaded enough to make decisions. They could also become sickeningly violent, if they felt the band was threatened. Pig, the largest, had once thrown an overenthusiastic fan off a roof, then run for a waiting helicopter with Memory under one arm and Jason Livingston, the bass player, under the other.

When the St. Louis crowd broke loose and overran the cops, the bodyguards adopted a siege mentality.

“Form the ‘Turtle'!” roared Pig, wrapping his wallet chain around his fist.

They squeezed Memory, Two-John, William Tell, and Jason into a kind of rock-band sandwich, and raced for the buses.

Pig bit someone. Gus used his keys to rip open scalps.

For Memory, the experience quickly became frightening. She had gotten into the habit of dropping acid before big shows, and the crowd all had witch faces.

William Tell had an open bottle of whiskey, which he passed to Two-John.

“Jesus Christ,” was all they said, smiling, sweaty but cool in their shades. Jason Livingston looked disgusted.

Gus and Pig went down. They came up together, bleeding, but not before two young girls, half dressed and wobbly-eyed, tackled William Tell and ripped his shirt loose.

“Goddammit!” spat Pig.

He reached for the twin Glock pistols in his waistband.

Suddenly a peculiar silence slammed down over everything, as if a magical bell jar of safety had descended from the sky. A tall figure took Memory by the arm. A tall figure who looked at once like a rock star and a rock, like a prince and a plumber, with eyes ten thousand years deep. Did he really look like that, or was it the acid?

The tall figure flashed a smile at Two-John and said, “How we doin'?” and Two-John handed him the whiskey bottle and said, “It's crowded.”

The Devil.

The bodyguards, who no longer needed to club and smash, were like pleasant, edgy clowns. They smiled and suggested, moving the crowd with words. Then they were all on the bus, laughing. Except for Pig, who sat looking like he might throw up.

“I was about to pull my guns,” he said.

He looked so pitiful. They laughed at him until he started laughing, too.

They formed an urgent line for the tiny bathroom, with the exception of William Tell, who just went outside and peed on the front bumper. The press took pictures, and Gus got blamed.

AFTER THEY CHECKED
into the hotel, they piled into the Kennedy limo, and went right back out into the night. Over two bridges, into the hills, to the home of a famous black comedian. A house with an impossible number of rooms, and both indoor and outdoor swimming pools. The comedian wore a woolly robe over a wet swimsuit. He smoked a cigar. At his party, he was too cool to be funny.

He tried, quite earnestly, to get Memory's memory to come back. He removed his sunglasses, revealing great, round, wonderful eyes. The acid in Memory's blood made them the eyes of God.

“You don't remember crying about something,” said the famous black comedian, “when you were a kid, maybe? Crying so hard it made your head hurt? You know what I mean. The kind of crying where you don't even want to feel better, you just want to keep on crying like that for the rest of your life, you're so mad and so sad, all at once?”

Memory said “No.” And she told him it was nice of him to try. She told him he was a Shiny Person.

She woke up in the pool the next morning, wearing someone else's fur coat.

The Devil sat on the diving board, watching her with bloodshot eyes. On the wall behind him was a sign:
SWIMMING OOL. NOTICE THERE IS NO
P
IN OUR POOL. PLEASE KEEP IT THAT WAY.

Memory scrunched her eyes closed. It hurt to read.

She opened the fur coat, confirming that she wore nothing else.

“So,” she said to the Devil. “You're back.”

“For now,” he said.

She wanted to get out, go find her clothes and a bathroom and some breakfast, but the water was warm, and her body felt heavy.

She went ahead and peed right where she was.

DAYS AND WEEKS
blended. There were hotels filled with famous people and parties. Girls went wild for Two-John and William Tell. William Tell liked to make forts out of naked girls, and hide in them until they collapsed.

Girls liked Jason Livingston, too, when they caught a glimpse of him. He was the shy one. Freakishly tall and thin, with long blond hair and eyes that always looked as if he'd just stopped crying.

On the highway, people followed them. Kids mostly, in VW buses or whatever they could get to run. They weren't the kids from the concerts, necessarily. Just people who saw the bright, shining bus from miles away, read P
URPLE
A
IRPLANE
on the side, and fell in behind. Sometimes they rode alongside, waving. If somebody waved back, the fans would shriek and make peace signs. Sometimes they even rode alongside the tech bus, and waved at the roadies. Whatever the roadies did or said, it scared most fans away.

THE RELEASE OF
DOROTHY
,
their first album, had carried them straight into the stratosphere of fame, where it seemed their slightest breath brought attention or sowed rumors. Like the rumor that Two-John was some kind of low-ranking East European prince, who kept a stable of rabbits for food. Like the rumor that Jason Livingston took pills by sticking them up his ass, or that Memory was called Memory because she actually had amnesia.

Through all the travel and the fame and the music, the Devil struggled to keep his own head in balance. He wasn't here to enjoy himself. Memory and her band had a purpose to serve, and he meant to see it was served right.

The music of Purple Airplane was like a magic carpet ride. It was a journey you went on; everyone said so. Maybe you danced to it. Maybe you stared into space, drugged by Memory's voice or Two-John's haunted guitar. But you went somewhere, something happened to you. Afterward, you felt like you knew a secret. Everyone said so, and the Devil thought, This is it! It's happening! The locked door at the center of everyday human life was finally opening, and they'd find some kind of wild garden inside where they'd grow into the beings he'd always known they could be.

And maybe they did, here and there, for a little while. Hard to say. If people felt the door open, they still got up the next day and answered the ordinary roll call of their lives.

Music journalists had a hard time explaining how the magic carpet worked. The Airplane's music spread in many directions, which was the same as no direction, and when one writer asked Memory what the band's direction
was
, she just stared right through him in the nicest way.

The Devil heard the question, though, and tossed it around in his head.

Being lost was a kind of direction, wasn't it? People talked about losing themselves in thought, in love, in conversation, or a TV show. You had to get lost to find the heart of anything, didn't you?

William Tell just snarled that if people needed directions they should ask a fucking cop.

IT WASN'T AN
ordinary life, by any means.

Unless you had nothing to compare it to, which Memory didn't.

The funny thing about living and remembering, she had discovered, was that it added up so fast. You spent all week looking forward to something—maybe a show, or time alone to take a bubble bath and drink a bottle of wine—and before you knew it the thing was happening, and then it was past. A week past, or a month. And before she knew it, she was a year older and had a million memories.

It was better than it had been, right? When it was just her and the moment and a black, silent, twenty-year hole?

She sat in a bubble bath in a Miami hotel, drinking a bottle of wine, watching the steam rise, trying to catalog what she
did
remember.

The catalog began on a hot dirt road with Queen Anne's lace and summer moths fluttering around, and woods on both sides. Every now and then the buzz of cicadas would rise around her like an invisible storm, then subside, and then rise again, and she walked down the shoulder with no shoes on in a simple white dress, and didn't even know she didn't know anything, not even her own name, until a woman pulled over in a pickup truck and asked her where she was going, and she didn't know.

“Town,” she had said. So the woman drove her to town.

The whole way Memory hid a rising panic, reaching out thought-fingers to find a complete and terrifying emptiness. The town turned out to be a college town, where another woman, a wonderful, knowing young woman named Dawn, discovered her in front of a Mexican restaurant, crying, and took her home to where she lived with a bunch of hippies. They named Memory “Memory” and helped her explore things like Being Useful—to clean things and wash clothes and cook a little—and important cautions like Don't Burn Yourself and Don't Walk in the Street. She learned things she Liked, like music, and Didn't Like, like coconut and yellow cheeses. This guy with a beard taught her to strum a guitar well enough that the people in the house encouraged her to play, until the day someone got her to sing, and she cast a spell on them. Her voice haunted itself from far away. And the bearded guy taught her that she liked making love, too, and dancing. She didn't like weeding Dawn's vegetable garden, particularly, but they all took turns. She learned about Helping and Work and Doing Your Share.

One day Dawn took her to the hospital to see if there was something they could do about her memory, but the doctors wanted to keep her under observation behind locked doors, and the two women barely escaped the hospital without getting snatched. Later that same week, some loud, happy men and women in a rusty Microbus stayed at the house for a couple of nights on their way to San Francisco, and when they left, Memory went with them. She watched the country unroll beyond the windshield until it frightened her, then made herself watch until it didn't.

San Francisco was like a fair for people like Memory, living in the present, unfettered by their past. One day she was singing along with a street band, and some older cat with a beard and sunglasses turned around and listened, and talked to her when she was done, and that cat was Dan Paul Overfield.

There was a year where they traveled and recorded songs, and, between Dan Paul and Memory, their band started getting famous. And it wasn't long before the band and the singing were all she knew, and she found herself wishing hard for real fame to come, because it might fill that twenty-year hole.

Now, of course, fame had risen like a spinning sun. But it did nothing to fill the hole, because you can't feed a soul-hunger. Feeding it just makes it hungrier. You have to feed whatever causes the hunger, and of course she couldn't.