Cages & Those Who Hold the Keys

by Gary A Braunbeck

  “Like that girl up there,” said Hendrix, pointing to a young woman crossing the street.

  “Do we need to pick her up?” asked the Reverend.

  Morrison shook his head. “No. She’s got nothing to do with this.”

  I stared at her. “Who is she?”

  “Roberta Martin,” said Garcia, Hendrix, and Buchanan simultaneously.

  I put the van in park and turned to face them. “Who?”

  “The greatest guitar player who ever lived,” said Morrison.

  I shrugged. “I’ve never heard of her.”

  “No reason you should have,” said Buchanan in his soft, soft voice. “She was killed by a drunk driver on her way to a gig in Nobelsville, Indiana in 1982.”

  “Girl was so good it was scary,” said Hendrix.

  Garcia nodded. “You got that right.”

  “Never recorded a demo for anyone,” said Buchanan. “She was only 22 when she died.”

  “I was only 25,” said Tommy Bolin.

  “Yeah,” replied Hendrix, “but it was your own fucking fault. By the way, I want my ring back.”

  “This one?” said Bolin, holding up his hand. “My girlfriend gave it to me.”

  “That was the same ring I was wearing when I died,” said Hendrix. “How the fuck she wound up with it, I don’t know.”

  Bolin removed the ring and tossed it to Hendrix. “It was kina tight, anyway.”

  “Says you.” Hendrix slipped it back on his finger, and the two men smiled at each other.

  “She’s a ghost,” said Cobain, pointing toward Roberta Martin. “We’re…shit, I guess you’d call us…what?”

  “Ulcerations of the idealized,” replied Entwistle.

  “Good going,” said Morrison. “We’re more than a memory but less than something alive.”

  “I still don’t understand.”

  “Who says that we do, hon?” asked Billie Holiday.

  In the street, Roberta martin stopped and turned toward the van. Everyone inside became quiet. She smiled at us, lifted her hand, waved, and then disappeared into the sleet.

  “Girl had the fire,” said Hendrix, his voice suddenly sad.

  “She sure did,” replied Buchanan.

  Cobain nodded. “A fuckin’ shame.”

  Jerry Garcia leaned forward, passing halfway through Janis Joplin, who shared his seat. “You know anything about physics, Sam?”

  “A little, I guess.”

  “So you know how black holes are formed by stars that collapse inward on themselves, right?”

  “Okay…?”

  “And how matter can be reformed into anything as it passes through…I mean, at least theoretically?”

  I shrugged. “I guess, sure.”

  “Then think of us as a something that’s come out of a black hole…only in this case, it’s a black hole of idealization, formed by a collapsing psyche.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, then shook my head and looked at the Reverend.

  “They’re not ghosts,” he said to me. “They’re the idealized versions of themselves. They’re not the people they were, they’re the icons, what they were imagined to be by those fans who idealized and worshipped them.”

  I nodded. “The legends, not the human beings?”

  “Right.” He looked back at our passengers. “Right?”

  “Close enough,” said Morrison. “At some point, every one of us has been idolized by someone. Be idolized by enough people, and that idol-image becomes more real to them than you ever could be. Fuck, man, I had so many people calling me a ‘rock god’ that I started believing it myself.”

  “I wouldn’t know, mate,” said Paul Kossoff.

  I looked back at the guitarist. “But you were good. Back Street Crawler was a kick-ass album.”

  “Thanks, mate. But after I left Free…” He shrugged. “All I was to the world—to whatever part of it still noticed me—was ‘ex-Free guitarist…’ And the only thing Free did that people still remember or care about was ‘All Right Now’.”

  “But at least that’s remembered,” I said.

  Kossoff smiled. “Yeah, there’s that.”

  “All it takes,” said Buchanan, “is one person. One person idolizes you, and you’re screwed. Like it or not, from that moment on…you kinda split in two. Some part of you is always aware of the idol-half” he gave his head a little shake. “And it can mess with you.”

  “Amen,” said Cobain.

  Morrison tapped my shoulder. “You need to get moving again.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Back to the good Reverend’s shelter.”

  “Why there?”

  “Because,” said Entwistle, “the source of the ulceration that brought us here should be there by now.”

  “You and your bloody loopy syntax,” said Keith Moon. “You always talked just like you played. Too damned busy for its own good.”

  “Coming from you,” said Entwistle, “I take that as a compliment.”

  “You would.” Then Moon smiled. “Good to see you again, Ox.”

  “Likewise.”

  I looked at the Reverend. “I’m scared.”

  He said nothing in return, and I knew.

  Despite what Morrison had said to us, the Reverend was scared, as well.

  6

  It didn’t help that none of them said a word after that, just sat back there staring out at the night and looking more and more like the ghosts they claimed not to be.

  They filed into the shelter silently, each finding a cot or a chair at various spots around the main floor, where they sat, watching all the doors and windows.

  The dog—Lump—sat up as soon as we came inside, his ears jerking. Missy sat down to pet him when he started growling, and Beth looked at her daughter, then to me.

  “Lump never growls,” she said. “I don’t know what’s gotten into him all of a sudden.”

  “It’s just a bad night,” I said, as if that could explain everything. “Where’s your son—sorry, I forgot his name.”

  “Kyle? He’s downstairs taking a shower.”

  “How’re you doing?”

  “Hm? Oh, me…I’m okay.” She patted her stomach. “The food really hit the spot.”

  “Well, if anybody wants seconds…”

  “You’re very nice.”

  “I try.”

  “Would it be all right if the kids watched Rudolph again? Kyle and Missy really like it, even though the Bumble kinda scares them.”

  “The Bumble?”

  “The Abominable Snow Monster. Remember, Yukon Cornelius calls it the ‘Bumble’?”

  “That’s right. Huh. Thing scared me half to death when I was a kid and saw it for the first time.”

  The Reverend called me over to the kitchen area, where he, Jackson, and Grant McCullers were warming up some stew and wrapping other food for the refrigerator. Grant was doing most of the wrapping, and doing it quickly. I only mention this because he’s got a bad hand that looks more like a claw than it does a human hand. It’s been that way for as long as I’ve known him. Arthritis. But he can play a mean harmonica better, serve drinks more smoothly, and wrap food faster and with more dexterity than anyone I’ve ever seen.

  “Hey, Sam, I hear you’re something of a music expert,” said Grant.

  “Not an expert, but I know trivia. Some trivia.”

  “Did you ever hear of a band called Parallax?” asked Grant.

  I looked at Jackson and the Reverend, both of whom were staring at me like the answer to this was something important.

  “Sure. They only did three albums, but they were pretty good.”

  Grant finished wrapping a half-pound of hamburger, tossed it onto the pile of to-be-frozen foods. “They were from Ohio, right?”

  I nodded. “Two of them were from Zanesville, but the guitarist, Byron Knight, he was from here, from Cedar Hill.”

  Grant exchanged an I-told-you-so look with Jackson, who nodded his head and gestured for the Rever
end and me to follow him into the back.

  “It was real nice of you to bring over all this food,” I said to Grant.

  “The new freezer’s a tad smaller than I’d planned, so I had to do something with this chow, y’know?”

  I grinned at his white lie. “How’s the Hangman coming along?”

  “I look to re-open in about two weeks.”

  “You gonna replace the old jukebox?”

  He stopped for a moment, thought about something, then shook his head. “You know, I don’t think I will. It works just fine. In fact, I’m getting rid of that new one.”

  The reverend came up behind me. “Are you two finished with this architectural discussion? I could use Sam’s help.”

  “You can always use Sam’s help,” said Grant. “In fact, I wonder if you’d get anything done if you didn’t have Sam’s help.”

  “And yours, and Ted’s, and God’s. I am useless without any of you.”

  Grant laughed. “Just wanted to hear you say it.”

  “It’s unbecoming of you, Grant. Fishing for a compliment.”

  “Been a bad couple of months. But you don’t want to hear about my dreadful personality problems.”

  “Your lips to God’s ear.”

  They looked at one another and smiled. The Reverend took hold of my elbow and we fell into step behind the sheriff.

  “This guy was in pretty bad shape,” said Jackson, “so Grant and I put him back in your office. Hope you don’t mind too much.”

  “As long as he hasn’t puked on everything.”

  Jackson grinned. “Not that kind of bad shape. The guy was shit-scared half out of his mind. Wanted to be put someplace where no one could see him.”

  “Did he get here before or after Bill Emerson?”

  “After.” Jackson grinned. “Can’t say any of us were much help to Bill.”

  “Still no word about Joe, then?”

  “Afraid not. I’ve got my deputies out looking for him, as well, now. Don’t worry, We’ll find him.”

  “God, I hope so.”

  We arrived at the door to the Reverend’s office-slash-living quarters. Jackson gripped the doorknob, then looked at us. “I was kinda into Parallax, too, when I was younger. That’s why I about fell over when I saw who this was.” He opened the door and we stepped into the room.

  Byron Knight—that’s right, the Byron Knight—was laying on a cot beside the Reverend’s desk. It had been almost 30 years since anyone had seen him. Most people who cared to remember him at all assumed that he was dead, what with his dramatic disappearance back in the early 1980s.

  The years had not been good to him. His once muscular frame—featured on the covers of both Rolling Stone and Melody Maker the same month—was now an emaciated ruin. The clothes he wore were torn, patched, and tattered. And the sickly-gray pallor of his skin betrayed an illness I was all-too familiar with: cancer. I’d watched it slowly chew my mother to death after Dad abandoned us when I was twelve.

  “The source of the ulceration,” whispered the Reverend.

  “The source of the what?” asked Jackson.

  The Reverend, ignoring the sheriff’s question, turned to me. “You stay here with him, Sam, all right? Don’t let anyone except me or Ted or Grant through the door, understand?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “What the hell is going on?” asked Jackson. “I only ask because it seems to me that neither one of you were too surprised to see him here. Me, I see a rock star from 30 years ago who I thought was dead, I get curious.”

  The Reverend took hold of Jackson’s arm and led him out of the room. “Lock the door behind us, Sam.”

  “Don’t have to tell me twice.”

  They left, I locked the door, and I heard a voice from behind me say one word.

  “…mudman….”

  Wow.

  Okay, it wasn’t quite the same as hearing Morrison call himself the Lizard King…but it was close.

  The Buckeye State has produced only four rock acts that ever amounted to anything more than passing curiosities; Devo (Akron), The James Gang (Cleveland), Guided By Voices (Dayton), and Parallax (Zanesville/Cedar Hill). Parallax came out of central Ohio in the mid-1970s, just as the progressive rock movement was hitting its zenith. Bands like Yes, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Flash, King Crimson, and a trio of Canadian upstarts calling themselves Rush were engulfing the airwaves with long, complex “concept” pieces like “Close to the Edge”, “Tarkus”, and “2112”. It was not uncommon (thanks to the earlier success of Iron Butterfly’s 17-minute “In a Gadda-Da-Vida”) to turn on your FM radio and hear only three songs played over the course of an hour. 10-minute songs were almost short compared to a half-hour epic like “Karn Evil 9.” It seemed that if you were going to be taken seriously in the prog rock movement (by anyone who wasn’t Lester bangs of Creem magazine), you had to produce a “concept” piece that would initially befuddle listeners while giving the DJs time to take a leisurely piss break. A lot of it was pretentious crap, but some of it was kind of amazing. It didn’t matter if you thought Rush’s “The Fountain of Lamneth” was overblown silliness, because Yes’s “The Revealing Science of God” might blow you away right after.

  One of these concept pieces that you could hear played on FM radio back then was an 18-minute beauty by Parallax entitled “Kiss of the Mudman.”

  What made “Mudman” so unique that even Lester bangs admitted a grumbling admiration for it (Bangs was infamous for loathing everything about the prog-rock movement) was its fusion of traditional blues with Hindi music. Critics were divided on whether or not it was a successful piece, but even those who disliked it had to admit that it was unlike anything produced during the short-lived prog era—and that it was performed by your basic rock trio, using only a bass, drums, and a single guitar, without any studio trickery or overdubs, served, according to Rolling Stone’s review, “…as a testament to Parallax’s serious-minded goals, if not their cumulative musicianship, which seems too agile at times to move ‘Mudman’ into the realm of potential classic. Still, Canada’s Rush might soon have reason to be looking over their shoulders if Knight, Shaw, and Jacobs continue to move in this direction.”

  Kiss of the Mudman (both the album and the song) made Parallax instant (if fleeting) icons. Their two previous albums (both of which had done okay but not great) were re-issued and sold like crazy, giving them two gold and one platinum album the same year, 1978.

  And then Alan Shaw, the bassist, died of a heroin overdose, and Tracy Jacobs, the drummer, was killed in an auto accident (it was later determined that he’d been drunk at the time). Byron Knight recorded a terrific solo album that just bombed, and then he dropped off the radar. Some college stations still dusted off “Mudman” from time to time when the DJs felt like making fun of it (or needed a leisurely piss break), and it, like the band who recorded it, was now nothing more than a curiosity piece.

  Still, if you were a fan, (like I’d been) to hear the man who’d written and sang the song mumble the word “…mudman…” was, well…still kind of a thrill, and I couldn’t help but remember the verse that had been all the rage for a few months back when I was a teenager:

  “You wonder where it all went wrong and why you feel so dead

  why it seems that every day you’re hanging by a thread

  Are you still who you were and not what you’ve become?

  Is this the taste of failure that lingers on your tongue?

  Your dreams are ending in a place

  far from where they began

  Because what’s on your lips

  Is the memory of the kiss

  Of the mudman…”

  Okay, “Blowin’ in the Wind” it wasn’t, but as a soul-sick cry of loneliness and alienation, it works—and that’s what “Mudman” was, an 18-minute musical suicide note, chronicling the last minutes of a dying rock star’s life as he looks back on all the people he’s hurt and left behind, knowing that none of it—the fame, the money, the wome
n and riches—was worth it, that all he’d ever wanted he’d pissed away, and now had to die alone, and deserved his fate.

  I’d always wondered just who or what the Mudman was (as did all the fans of the piece), but Knight would never say.

  “…sonofabitch,” he slurred from the cot as he attempted to sit up. I went over and helped him, got him a glass of water, and watched as he pulled a bottle of pills from his pocket and popped two of them into his mouth. “For the pain,” he said, taking a deep drink of the water. Setting down the glass, he wiped his mouth, rubbed his eyes, and looked at me. “Was I dreaming, or did you say something about an ulceration?”

  I shook my head. “That was someone else, the Reverend, the man who runs this shelter.”

  “Ah.” He blinked, coughed a few times, and rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m kinda sick, I’m afraid.”

  “Cancer.” It was not a question.

  He looked at me. “Seen it before, have you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m not gonna flip out on you. I just needed to get a little shut-eye in a warm place.”

  “You’re Byron Knight.”

  He paled at the mention of his name. “I was Byron Knight. Now I’m just a sick transient who’s come back to his hometown to die. Think the Reverend would have any objection to my doing it here?”

  “We’ve had people pass away before. The Reverend never forces anyone to leave if they don’t want to.”

  “That’s good, because I don’t want to. Don’t have anywhere to go, anyway.” He ran his fingers through his hair, then stuck out his hand. “You are?”

  “Sam,” I said, shaking his hand.

  “What the fuck happened to that ear of yours?”

  I touched it, as I always do whenever someone asks me about it. “Frostbite.”

  “You hear out of it? No, huh?”

  “Nope.”

  “So I guess it was a dumb question.”

  “Not really.”

  He sniffed, then looked around the room. “Your Reverend, he wouldn’t have any booze stashed around here by chance, would he?”

  I knew the Reverend kept a bottle of brandy in his desk. I got it out and poured Knight a short one.