Rock On

by Howard Waldrop

  Lydia looks down and sees herself in the dresser mirror on the floor. She screams and stamps her feet on it. The mirror doesn’t crack, but she’s still stamping, and when it breaks she’ll gash her feet. I have to stop her.

  No.

  This isn’t right. But if Christopher would let her rage, then I must do likewise if I want her to believe I’m him. Even now, as she attacks the mirror, she’s looking at me with suspicion inside her fury.

  She expects arousal.

  Having trouble getting aroused in the presence of a naked Lydia Love was not a problem I anticipated.

  She stops screaming and stamping as if a switch in her brain has been flipped to OFF. The mirror has cracked, but it hasn’t cut her feet. She leaves it and comes toward me, moving with tentative steps, avoiding the broken pieces of crystal. Except for the nick on her arm, she seems to be all right. The rage has drained from her eyes, and what’s left is a puzzled fear.

  “Christopher?” she says. Her voice quavers. Her ribs strain against her skin as she breathes.

  She is looking at my crotch.

  What did I tell you?

  This was the one area I hoped the surgeons wouldn’t touch, and to my relief they decided that it was close enough as it was. Christopher had an average body with average parts, and so do I. So they didn’t change much besides my face and voice.

  But the surgeons couldn’t see me with Lydia’s eyes. And now she’s looking close for the first time. She’s realizing that I’m someone else.

  No. She’s only confused because we’re not excited.

  Lydia stops at the foot of the bed and shifts her weight from one hip to the other. Her tangled hair is draped over her left shoulder. Her lips are even more swollen than usual.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispers.

  Oh. Well.

  Maybe I’m more like Christopher than I thought.

  You are Christopher.

  Shut up. I can do this myself now. Whoever I am.

  Later I take Christopher’s beat-up white Chevy pickup truck and head for the H.E.B. in Kerrville. Lydia worries over me as I leave the house, but she doesn’t pitch another fit. She gives me a cash card with ten thousand bucks on it, kisses me, and tells me to come home safe, goddamn it. As I let the truck coast down the switchbacked driveway, I glance into the rearview mirror and see that both Lydia and the stained-glass eye are watching me. Then the trees obscure them, but I know they’re still there.

  As I reach Texas 27, a guy in a lawn chair under the trees on the far side of the highway points a camcorder at me. He’s probably only a tabloid ’razzi, but I wait until the driveway’s automatic gate closes behind me before I turn toward Kerrville. After all, Lydia Love has more than her share of obsessive fans. That hasn’t changed even though she hasn’t recorded and has hardly performed in the three years since Christopher Jennings came into her life. But I guess her fans know as well as I do that the phoenix will rise again.

  And it will rise thanks to me. To Willie.

  You are Christopher.

  Thanks to both of us, then.

  The pickup doesn’t have air-conditioning, which says something about Christopher’s economic situation before he met Lydia. I roll down both windows and let the hot breeze blast me as I follow the twisting highway eastward alongside the Guadalupe River. Kerrville, a small town with a big reputation, is just a few miles away.

  Its big reputation is the result of its annual folk-music festival, but I stopped going to the festival two years ago. It seemed as if almost everyone was using amplifiers and distortion, trying to be Lydia Love. She’s my favorite singer too, but some of these kids can’t get it through their heads that if Lydia didn’t make it big by trying to look and sound like someone else, they shouldn’t try to look and sound like someone else either.

  Like I’ve got room to talk. It’s only now that I do look and sound like someone else that I have a shot at a future in the music business.

  The supermarket’s the first thing on my left as I come into town. After parking the truck, I find a pay phone on the store’s outside wall, run the cash card through it, and punch up Danny Daniels’ number in Dallas. Daniels is an L.A. boy, but he says he’ll be working at CCA-Dallas until he can get a new Lydia Love album in the can. If he wants to stay close to her, he’d do better to relocate to CCA-Austin—but when I pointed that out, he gave a theatrical shudder and said, “Hippies.” I guess Dallas is closer to being his kind of scene.

  He comes on the line before it rings. “Yo, Christopher,” he says. “Except for that minor bout of impotence this morning, you’re doing peachy-keen. Keep it up. And I mean that.”

  Unlike the original Christopher, I know that I’m being observed while I’m with Lydia. But there ought to be limits.

  “You don’t have to watch us screw,” I say. “Sex is just sex. It’s the other stuff that’ll break us up.”

  “But sex is part of ‘the other stuff,’ Chris,” Daniels says. “So just pretend you’re alone with her. Besides, if everything continues going peachy-keen, I’m the only one who’ll see it. And it’s not like I’m enjoying it.”

  How could anyone not enjoy seeing Lydia Love naked? I wonder.

  Or is that Christopher?

  You are Christopher.

  Not when I’m on the phone with Danny Daniels.

  You are Christopher.

  Let me think.

  You are Christopher.

  “The chip’s talking too much,” I tell Daniels. “It’s getting in my face, and Lydia’s going to notice that something’s not right.”

  Daniels sighs. “We put everything we know about the Christopher-Lydia relationship into that chip, so of course it’s gonna have a lot to say. I’ve already told you, just think of it as your conscience.”

  “My conscience doesn’t speak from my back teeth.”

  “It does now,” Daniels says. “But it won’t last long. The shrinks say that Lydia would have given Christopher the heave-ho in another six weeks if he hadn’t been killed, and now they tell me that she won’t stay with the resurrected version for more than another three months. Then you’ll be out on your butt, she’ll do her thing, and everybody’ll be happy. Including Willie Todd.”

  What about me?

  You’ll be happy too, because I’m you. Isn’t that what you keep telling me? Now back off. Daniels sounds like he might be pissed-off, and I don’t want him pissed-off. Not at me, anyway.

  Why? You scared of him?

  No. But I know where my bread’s buttered.

  “Thanks, Danny,” I say. “We just had a bad morning, that’s all. Sorry I griped.”

  The phone is voice-only, but I can sense his grin. “No problem. You need a pep talk, I’m your guy. And if you feel like chewing my ass, that’s cool too. After all, you’re Christopher now, and Christopher once told me that he wanted to rip off my head and shit down my neck.”

  “Why’d he—I mean why’d I—”

  We.

  “—do that?”

  “Because I told him he was fucking up Lydia’s creative process,” Daniels says. “Which he was. But I shouldn’t have told him so. She was going to dump you anyway.”

  Or maybe I would have dumped her. Smug asshole never considers that.

  I remember Lydia’s rage this morning. No matter how beautiful and talented she is, that sort of thing can wear a man down. “I think she might be about half-crazy,” I say.

  Daniels laughs. “The bitch is a genius. What do you expect?”

  Well, I guess I expect her to dump me, have her usual creative burst, and for the world to be in my debt. And for my first album, Willie Todd, to be released on datacard, digital audio tape, and compact disc.

  You are Christopher.

  Yeah, yeah.

  “Guess that’s all, Danny,” I say. “Just figured I should check in.”

  Why? He’s watching us all the time anyway.

  “Glad you did, Chris,” Daniels says, and the line goes dead.

>   I head into the ice-cold store, and now that I’m off the phone, I have a moment in which all of this—my new voice, my new face, my new name, my place in the bed of Lydia Love—seems like a lunatic scam that can’t work and can’t be justified.

  But CCA has the psychological profiles, the gizmos, and the money, so CCA knows best. If it makes sense to them, it makes sense to me too. And what makes sense to CCA is that Lydia Love’s creative process has followed a repeating cycle for the past eleven years:

  At seventeen, after graduating from high school in Lubbock, Lydia had a violent breakup with her first serious boyfriend, a skate-punk Nintendo freak. Immediately following that breakup, she went without sleep for six days, writing songs and playing guitar until her fingers bled. Then she slept for three days. When she awoke she drained her mother’s savings account, hopped a bus to Austin, and bought twelve hours of studio time. She mailed a digital tape of the results to Creative Communications of America and went to bed with the engineer who’d recorded it.

  The recording engineer became her manager, and he lasted in both his personal and professional capacities for a little over a year—long enough for Lydia to start gigging, to land a contract with CCA, and to buy a house in a rich Austin suburb. Then her new neighbors were awakened one night by the sounds of screaming and breaking glass, and some of them saw the manager/boyfriend running down the street, naked except for a bandanna. The sound of breaking glass stopped then, but the screaming continued, accompanied by electric guitar.

  The next day, Lydia’s debut album, First Love, was released at a party held in the special-events arena on the University of Texas campus. The party was supposed to include a concert, but Lydia didn’t show up. She was in the throes of her second creative burst.

  The music that emanated from her house over the next three weeks was loud, distorted, disruptive, and Just Not Done in that suburb. The neighbors called the cops every night, and at the end of Lydia’s songwriting frenzy, one of the cops moved in with her.

  The cop suggested that Lydia take the advance money for her second album and build a home and studio out in the Hill Country west of the city, where she could crank her amplifiers as high as she liked. He supervised the construction while Lydia toured for a year, and when she came home they went inside together and stayed there for a year and a half. Lydia’s career might have ended then had it not been for the fact that both her tour and her second album had grossed more money than the rest of CCA’s acts combined. So between CCA, the tabloid papers and TV shows (“Lydia Love Pregnant with Elvis’s Siamese Twins”), and the continuing popularity of her music, Lydia’s name and image remained in the public eye even if Lydia didn’t.

  Then the ex-cop showed up at an emergency room in Kerrville with a few pellets of birdshot in his buttocks, and the county sheriff found the alleged shooter making loud noises in her basement studio. CCA rejoiced, and the third album sold even better than the first two.

  Lydia’s next boyfriend lasted almost as long as the ex-cop had. He was your basic Texas bubba (Lydia seems to go for us common-man types), and he and Lydia settled into a happy routine that could have ruined her. But then he went to a rodeo and was seduced by two barrel racers. The photos and videos hit the stands and the tube before the bubba even got out of bed. When he tried to go back to Lydia’s, he found the driveway blocked by a pile of his possessions. They were on fire.

  Creative Burst #4 followed, and that resulted in the twenty-three songs of Love in Flames, my favorite album by anybody, ever. Lydia followed that with a world tour that took two years of her life and made CCA enough money to buy Canada, if they’d wanted it. And it was while Lydia was on that tour, Daniels says, that CCA bugged her house. The corporation wanted to be sure that they could send help fast if she hurt herself in one of her rages.

  When Lydia came home from the tour, she discovered that a hailstorm had beaten up her roof. She hired an Austin company to repair it, and Christopher Jennings, a twenty-four-year-old laborer and semi-professional guitarist, was on the crew. When the job was finished and the rest of the crew went back to the city, he stayed.

  Christopher and Lydia had been together for almost eighteen months when Lydia agreed to do a free concert in India. They went together, but Christopher took a side trip to Nepal. On the way back to New Delhi, his plane detoured to avoid a storm, hit a worse one, and went down in a mountainous wasteland claimed by both India and Pakistan. The mountains, frequent storms, and constant skirmishes between the opposing armies made the area inaccessible, and all aboard the airplane were presumed dead.

  Lydia remained in India for two months before coming back to Texas, and then CCA rubbed their collective hands. They figured that with Christopher now a corpse on a mountainside, they’d soon have more Lydia Love songs to sell to the world.

  But six more months passed, and the studio in Lydia’s basement remained silent. Death and grief couldn’t substitute for betrayal and anger. CCA, and the world, had lost her.

  Then one night a scruffy day laborer and aspiring singer-songwriter named Willie Todd was playing acoustic guitar for tips in a South Austin bar, and a man wearing a leather necktie approached him.

  “Son,” the necktied man said, “my name is Danny Daniels, and I sign new artists for CCA. How would you like to record your songs for us?”

  To a guy who grew up in a Fort Worth trailer park with six brothers and sisters, no father, and no money, Daniels looked and sounded like Jesus Christ Himself. I’d been trying to break into the money strata of the Austin music scene for five years, and I was still lugging junkyard scrap by day and playing for tips at night. But with just a few words from Danny Daniels, all of that was over. He took me into a studio and paid for my demo, then flew me to Los Angeles to meet some producers.

  It was only then that I found out what I’d have to do before CCA would give Willie Todd his shot. And although it sounded weird, I was willing. I still am. As Daniels explained, this thing should have no down side. After the breakup, I get my old face and voice back, Lydia’s muse gets busy again, and CCA releases great albums from both of us.

  So here I am in the Kerrville H.E.B., buying tortillas and rice for Lydia Love, the biggest Texas rock ’n’ roll star since Buddy Holly . . . and for her most recent boyfriend, a dead man named Christopher.

  You are Christopher.

  But I’m not dead. Dead men don’t buy groceries.

  Dead men don’t sleep with Lydia Love.

  It’s my seventh week with Lydia, and something I didn’t expect is happening. As I’ve settled back into life with her, I’ve begun to see her as something other than the singer, the sex symbol, the video goddess: I have begun to see her as a dull pain in the ass.

  Her rage before my first grocery run hasn’t repeated itself, and I wish that it would. She’s gone zombie on me. Sometimes when she’s lying on the floor with a bowl of bean dip on her stomach, watching the tube through half-closed eyes, I wonder if she was the one who decided to end her previous relationships. I wonder if maybe one or two of the men made the decision themselves.

  Why do you think I took that side trip to Nepal?

  She has a gym full of exercise equipment, but she hasn’t gone in there since I’ve come back. So I’ve been working out by myself to take the edge off my frustration, and I’m heading there now while she watches a tape of a lousy old movie called A Star Is Born. A run on the treadmill sounds appropriate.

  Even the sex has started going downhill.

  We could look elsewhere. I was starting to, before the plane crash.

  No. Forget I said anything. Lydia’s just moody; that’s part of what makes her who she is. It would be stupid of me to mess up a good thing.

  Isn’t that what you’re supposed to be doing?

  I don’t know. Are we talking about Willie or Christopher? According to CCA, Willie is here to give Lydia someone to break up with, but Christopher ought to be here because he cares about her. So which one am I?

  You are
Christopher.

  All right, then. We can’t just let things go on like this, so let’s try something. Lydia hasn’t picked up a guitar since I came back, and neither have I. Maybe if she and I played together—

  She’s too critical of other guitar players. We don’t like being humiliated.

  In front of whom?

  Ourselves. And the people behind the walls.

  But CCA’s already agreed to put out my album. They already know I’m good. What difference will it make if Lydia and I play a few tunes together?

  CCA is putting out an album by Willie Todd. You are Christopher.

  I don’t care.

  So I hop off the treadmill, and as I start to leave the gym, Lydia appears in the doorway. She’s wearing the same gray sweats she wore yesterday and the day before. Her skin is blotchy, and she looks strung-out. It occurs to me that she might be taking drugs.

  Of course she is. When things don’t go her way, she takes something. Or breaks something.

  “I’m going to kill myself,” Lydia says. Her voice is a monotone.

  Oh shit.

  Don’t worry. This is old news. She craves drama, and if she doesn’t get it, she invents it. Ignore her.

  She’s threatening suicide. I’m not going to ignore that.

  I would.

  Well, Willie wouldn’t.

  Sure he would. CCA wouldn’t pick a new Christopher who didn’t have the same basic character traits as the old Christopher.

  Shut up. I’ve got to concentrate on Lydia.

  But she’s already disappeared from the doorway. I zoned out, and she’s gone to kill herself.

  No, she’s gone to eat or get wasted. Or both.

  Fuck off. Just fuck off.

  That’s no way to talk to yourself.

  I run down the hallway, yelling for her. She’s not in any of the bedrooms, the kitchen, the dining room, the front room, or the garage. Not out on the deck or in the back yard. But she could be hidden among the trees, hanging herself. She could already be dead, and it would be me that killed her. Just because I wanted a break, just because I made a deal with CCA, just because I flew off and died on a mountainside, leaving her alone and unable to write or sing.