Metal Angel

by Nancy Springer

  “What about this devil Volos?” Reverend Crawshaw asked him. “Does he paint himself?”

  “He likes many colors of eyeshadow, yes.”

  “Then he is a degenerate. Is he also an apostate?”

  “He has never publicly claimed to be an angel. In fact, he dislikes it when anyone calls him that. But observers who write for the magazines say that his wearing of wings must be taken as a statement.”

  “In other words he wears wings to call himself an angel, then lives the life of Satan—is he a fornicator?”

  “A sodomizer, some say.”

  Reverend Crawshaw gasped as if he had been struck, and his eyes bugged. But then he smiled.

  “Wears wings and is a sodomizer—”

  “That is hearsay.”

  “I am sure it is true. God tells me in my heart that it is true. Therefore our duty is made plain to us. This Volos, who wears the wings of an angel and drags them in filth and sings the songs of Beelzebub—this Volos is too evil to be merely another sinful man. Perhaps the end days are at hand. Perhaps he is the Antichrist, or an incarnation of the Evil One himself. Ennis. My son.” The minister laid a hand on his shoulder. “We must destroy him if we can.”

  Ennis went home in a daze of doubt and joy. Reverend Crawshaw had called him his son! Of course, he was legally the man’s son-in-law, but that had never made the holy man speak to him as a real son before. Reverend Crawshaw had said the word warmly, solemnly, seeming to adopt him with it—making Ennis his heir? His spiritual inheritor? His anointed?

  But—destroy Volos? The strange winged rocker was reputed to be the very best axwhacker ever. And he sang like—well, like an angel.

  Perhaps by “destroy” Reverend Crawshaw meant something along the lines of making Volos take back some of the things he had said. Ennis promised himself that he would clarify the matter with his father-in-law the next time he saw him. Almost certainly he would be reassured.

  Just that day Ennis had bought the cassette tape of Scars. Once home, tablet and Bic pen in hand to record offensive lyrics, he put it in his tape player and settled back to listen.

  Halfway through Side One he began to feel guilt lashing him because he was enjoying the music. In fact he loved it, no matter how many questionable or disrespectful or plainly obscene lyrics he jotted down. Something in the strong, supple vocals and the wild excess of the guitars called to him. To think that after he finished this assignment he would never be allowed to listen to such music again—and he would never be allowed to admit to anyone how much he liked it—to think these things was to know life for what it was: denial, a long and difficult denial. Obedience was very hard sometimes.

  The last song on Side One, a song not released as a single, was called “One Feather.”

  What you call heaven I call hell

  It’s all shame and blame

  So how can I tell

  If I love you?

  Ennis jolted upright, not able to believe what he was hearing.

  Then he turned off the tape player, got up, and went to his bedroom, where he kept a piece of paper carefully put away in a cuff-link box in the top drawer of his dresser. He got out the penciled sheet and read it yet again, for maybe the hundredth time, with a lump in his throat not so much because of what it said as because she had written such a thing, a poem, for him. Just for him. To ease the pain. When he had not known she ever wrote poetry at all.

  With Angela’s leave-taking message in hand he went back downstairs, started the Volos tape again, and listened.

  If what I do is so hard on you

  Then maybe we were wrong from the start…

  The record was just released. In no way could Angela have heard it before she wrote her poem.

  Ennis listened through the rest of the song, then looked down at the frail thing in his hand and tore it to bits.

  It sounded to him like a good idea, now, to destroy Volos.

  Angela … would she be with the winged freak? Odd, that it should cause him so little joy to learn how he might find … Ennis discovered that he was no longer inclined to think of her by name. She was just Her. The Fallen Woman. His wife who had betrayed him and sold his poem to a foul-mouthed rock star. Who had left him with a careless farewell and taken away his two little boys.

  Gabe and Mikey …

  Longing for his sons flooded him, so overwhelming it made him feel physically weak and sick. He would never get over losing them, never. Yesterday would not have been soon enough for him to be with them again.

  Where were they? That city of sin, L.A.? Or wandering? A trashy stop along the road somewhere?

  They were in a Travelodge on the outskirts of Wichita, and Mikey was coughing in his sleep. Congestion disturbed his breathing so that he sputtered and woke up. Children never accept illness with much grace; it insults them. More because of such insult than because of physical discomfort, Mikey began to howl.

  The roadie, who had no more than just fallen asleep after working almost until dawn, elbowed his wife and groaned. “Dammit! Can’tcha shut that kid up?”

  Eyes closed, the woman mumbled, “She’ll take care of it.” Unglued her non-pillowed eye enough to see if Angie was moving. Absorbed the input for a moment. Angie was not there.

  “Where the hell does she get off …”

  Sighing, the roadie’s wife heaved herself up and went to Mikey. “Okay, okay.” She picked him up, and because he knew her and considered that he was being attended to, he quieted. “You need changed? No. Blow your nose.” He blew. His face felt feverish under her hand. “You’re coming down with something, little fella.”

  By mashing it into Gerber’s applesauce and then spooning it down him she gave him her cure-all: half a tablet of aspirin.

  chapter thirteen

  Mercedes was no fool. He had known before Wichita, before Volos knew it himself, that the angel was not going to be coming to him for sex much longer. He felt some rage, not so much the jealous rage of a lover as the spleen of one stopped at yet another traffic light on the road to The Top. But also, for the first time in his life, he felt a cold-fingered fear: What if there was to be no Top for him? What if he simply did not have what it took? Being intimate with Volos, he had begun to see that there was some quality in the star that he, Mercedes, lacked and did not comprehend. What if his moment came, and he stood on the stage and no one—no one loved him?

  He did not analyze the fear and anger or waste time on them. Instead, he had began working on new ways to keep Volos attached to him. “Attached” in its primal sense: unable to get away.

  “It will make you feel bigger,” he had said the first time he offered the white powder. “It will make you feel like a thunderhead, full of electricity. Like you could reach out your hand and say, ‘Let there be fire,’ and there would be.”

  Volos had accepted, but remarked, “To be like God, is this what you want?” and Mercedes had stared at him.

  “Don’t you?”

  “No. I do not think very highly of God. Why would I want to be like him?”

  Mercedes bit down on fury, feeling spurned or soon to be spurned. First body and now soul. Offering deification via drug, he had in a sense been offering his soul: Of all drugs, cocaine was his favorite for that very reason, because it made him sense self expanding into incandescent godhead. And now finally he could afford the really good stuff with the money Volos would give him, and Volos did not want to be God? Mercedes decided right then and there that Volos was a no-class jerk-off who did not deserve anything the world was giving him, not wealth or fame or love. Mercedes could know this categorically, because among classy people wanting to be God was a tacit given, like masturbation. Everyone who was anyone did it, though it was gauche to say so.

  Rather sniffily, Mercedes said, “I just mean it makes you feel up. As if you are made of energy. Plugged in.”

  Volos shrugged. “Music gives me that.” He looked at Mercedes and added, “But of course I will do this if you want me to. You say in
my nose?”

  The disbelief in his voice annoyed Mercedes more than the knowledge that he was losing him to Angie Bradley.

  They took the drug, listened to Alice Cooper awhile, made love for what Mercedes knew might be the last time. The cocaine did not seem to affect Volos much, but Mercedes did not allow himself to feel discouraged. There were other drugs.

  He begged a meeting with Volos a few days later, saying he had some tour business to discuss. In fact he had acquired some acid.

  “Want a hit, Volie?” he offered. “It will make you see colors you have never imagined.”

  “New colors?” This time Volos was intrigued. “How can there be more colors than those I already know?”

  “You’ll see. Try it.” In a retro-sixties mood, Mercedes lit incense and served the hallucinogen ceremoniously. Because his aesthetic sense could not stomach paper squares with unicorns printed on them, he had opted for liquid in a small brown bottle complete with bulb and dropper. For himself, he would put it in his eyes. For Volos, however, he placed four drops on a sugar cube.

  “Like that?” The angel sounded as intrigued by the many ways of taking drugs as he was by anything else about them. “Why not up my nose? Or in a cigarette, like the marijuana? Or in a bottle, like beer?”

  “Because beer is for bottle babies and pot is for lollysuckers. You get sweets for the sweet. Come on, Vo.”

  “You, too.”

  “No, with this stuff we take turns.”

  He half hoped the angel would have a bad trip. Also, he had plans. Once the acid began to work, he took advantage of Volos’s disorientation to get him out of his jeans. He had thought he wanted to blow him; in fact he did want that, badly, and why did he not do it then? Yet he shoved his drugged lover onto the bed instead, and held him down and tickled him, all parts of him, for a long time. Volos did not resist—he could never have done it if Volos had put up a fight—but lay gasping and trying to get away and laughing himself hoarse, finally whimpering like a puppy before Mercedes grew bored with the torment and screwed him instead.

  The next day Volos did not remember what had been done to him, but merely said, “I saw colors, but they did not feel good. Also, it seems this acid has made me sore all over.”

  Mercedes knew better than to ask him to take it again. His own fault, for losing control. He would have to watch himself, remembering to focus on his long-term goals.

  “Heroin,” he explained to Volos the next time. “Smack. The ultimate.”

  “Mercy, the ultimate experience of life is death.”

  “Yes … well, there is a chance of that.”

  “And the other chance?”

  “Ecstasy.”

  Sitting on the bed in yet another beige hotel room, Volos looked steadily into his eyes, like a comrade in some obscure war. Mercedes kneeled in front of him holding the rubber tube and the hypodermic.

  “With a needle in my arm,” Volos said slowly.

  “Yes.”

  “In my blood.”

  “Yes, Vo. And then in mine.” Ah, the mystic brotherhood. Mindful of its power, Mercedes invoked it, watched Volos for its effect, saw the singer’s gaze fix raptly on him, and knew that he had won him over.

  “Make a fist,” he instructed.

  It was not difficult to find a vein on that lean, hard arm. Mercy shot Volos nearly the whole fix, leaving little for himself. But the precaution was not necessary. As he pulled the needle out, Volos slumped sideways and rolled off the bed, unconscious.

  “Shit!” Probably Volos had not even experienced the rush. It was that fucking unpredictable physique of his that wouldn’t respond right to drugs. The sonuvabitch probably hadn’t “imagined himself” as a junkie. He would wake up in a few hours as indifferent to smack as he was to marching powder.

  Mercedes let him lie on the floor as he washed the rest of his expensive treat down the drain. He really did not want to mess with heroin himself. Cocaine was a much classier addiction. He allowed himself a line of it, then went out and found a stranger willing to sexually relieve him in the men’s room of the local bowling alley, then came back and went to bed.

  Volos still lay sprawled on the floor when he got up, and he began to worry. If Volos missed the sound check, somebody would come looking for him. Mercedes tried cold water and pinching without any satisfactory result. But an hour later, on his own and without preamble, Volos came to.

  “Mercy,” he whispered. He got up, his face red and stippled from contact with the carpet but smiling. “Mercedes! Is it the next day?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have never felt anything like that! Suddenly I was sleeping. Was I sleeping?”

  “Yes. Certainly.”

  “For all that time?”

  “Of course.”

  “But—but it felt wonderful. I was—it was as if I was not at all. It was oblivion. Yet here I am. Do you see?”

  “Yes, Vo. Certainly.”

  What Mercedes actually saw was his future brightening. He began to answer Volos’s smile. “So you like being asleep,” he said.

  “Yes. It is a wonderful letting go. It is—such freedom.”

  Volos could not completely explain why the heroin experience had so deeply excited and delighted him, how Mercy’s magic needle had sent him to a shadow-land entirely new to him, how he had wandered, lost as a soul, and sometimes found dreams. Awake, he remembered no more than the edges of the dreams, but he felt hope: to sleep, to experience this facsimile of death, was perhaps to be more human, more a part of the mortal world. To sleep, perchance to dream—it was perchance to belong. Perchance even someday to catch a dream in music and words, to write a song of his own.

  Being human was turning out to be not at all as he had envisioned it. This thing of trying drugs, for instance. He had expected that to take place at wild parties, amid chaos and heavy music and maybe clusterfucking, and instead here he was being dosed by Mercedes as if taking instruction at an archon’s wing, learning drugs one by one like questions in a catechism. It was so tame. He was so tame. Where were the parties? He was a rock star on tour, it should be all parties and after-concert crumpets, and instead it was all work and Mercy and a soft-spoken sweet-faced woman and her two little boys.

  He had come down in order to rebel; he tried and tried to be bad, but those who were truly bad saw through him and scorned him. The true heavy-metal rockers called him a pussy rocker, a wimp in disguise. And they were right; he loved his own body too much. At one point he had thought of having tattoos, he had contemplated entwining a blue-ink serpent around the base of his left wing, or wearing a flaming heart on his chest, or “MERCY” in script on his shoulder. But there had been no guts in him to alter his smooth dun skin. He had contemplated also the holes for ornaments, the piercing of ears or nose or lips or nipples, and he had not been able to make himself do these small mutilations either, not even so much as one hole in one ear to take a silver swinging devil. Some rockers destroyed themselves with alcohol or drugs or sorrows, and Volos had not given up on those ideas. He was trying the Jack Daniels, the smack. But he suspected himself of being a craven wearing wolf’s clothing, because in his heart he knew liquor and drugs would not affect him much. Sorrow would affect him more. He had not yet made occasion to try sorrow.

  He was always finding the limits of his own wickedness. Aside from loving his own dusky flesh, he perhaps loved Angie. And, in a different way, he loved the very world she moved in. He loved the people he met, all of them, the girl lifting her crop-top to flash her breasts at him, the old poodle-haired woman scowling at him out a tour-bus window, the young man driving a Porsche with one hand at his crotch, the worried middle-aged storekeeper chasing skateboarders off his parking lot, the mouth-breathing kids on the boards, the gum-chewing cashiers, all of them, all. The do-gooders picketing his shows, and the booing kids mobbing the pickets. And he loved the towns they all lived in, with the Movie Shak and the B-Tan Tanning Salon and the old factory turned into apartments or mini-storage,
the Cut-Rate Food Mart and the Foursquare Gospel Church and an unmarked house in some back street where women named Bambi and Crystal and Lou Beth were available. He liked Lou Beth, though she did not like him and wanted nothing to do with a queer in wings. He liked the movies he rented at the Shak. He even liked church bells. He no longer really wanted to insult or appall anyone.

  Except Yahweh, Jehovah, Elohim, Tetragrammaton. Except God. But that holy name alone was enough to keep him trying: the liquor, the drugs. Perhaps soon the sorrow.

  Texas had never abused controlled substances in his life. But even though he drank little and used no drugs, the road trip between Wichita and Toledo was largely a blur to him. All the towns, all the hotels, all the interstates began to look alike to him, and he hated them all. There was too much work: set up, work the concert, strike the set, move on, do it all again. Never enough sleep for anyone.

  He worried about Angie. Especially for her there had not been enough sleep. Mikey had a cold with fever high enough to keep him peevish but not high enough to bother calling a doctor for. He kept her up most nights. Volos was no help. It bothered Texas that the kid seemed so oblivious to people’s problems. He pestered Angie for kisses between sets, got puppy-eyed when she lost her temper at him, didn’t seem to understand, didn’t stay around long enough for her to explain. Was spending his nights with Mercedes again. Texas felt as if he had about had it with Volos.

  Though, to be fair, it wasn’t just Volos, Texas had to admit. Whatever was eating at him had a lot to do with geography. As the states became day by day smaller, more eastern, more crowded together, he grew as cranky as Angie’s ailing child. Burning Earth was scheduled to make no stop in West Virginia, was only to cut through the state’s knife-blade tip on the way to Pittsburgh, but the closer Texas got to his home the more something seemed to tug at him like a fishhook caught under his heart. On the bus he paced the aisles until the roadies swore at him, yelling that they were trying to sleep. Even in a hotel bed he lay with eyes wide burning open.