Rock On

by Howard Waldrop

  The All-Nite Milk Bar never opened the next evening; nor any other evening. Dermott had had a stroke in the night. He was dead at the age of forty.

  “You realize what was playing before we left?” Colleen looked searchingly at me with her brown eyes.

  “Don’t,” I said. “Don’t.”

  The milk bar got closed up. A few windows got poked out by kids before they boarded it over. There was some talk of it re-opening or being converted, but nothing ever happened. Its location was useless as a commercial proposition, and Dermott had only ever kept it on because he didn’t know what else to do.

  The weeks went by, and Colleen and I began to spend more and more time with each other. It was going to be our last summer together, as I was preparing to go off to college. We avoided talking about it. Then her folks found some stuff in her bedroom drawer. It all got blamed on me, which was ridiculous since Colleen was always first over the edge in anything we did, and I was banned from seeing her. Her old man belted her black and blue, and threatened to bury me. Then her folks told my folks, and there was a lot of hysteria and squawking, but that was the deal, to keep the police out of it.

  Of course we didn’t stop seeing each other. We just couldn’t phone or meet in any obvious place. Ironically, she was powdering the milk more than ever before, and, well, I sort of went along with anything she did. Then one night I got a phone call from a friend of hers. It was quite late, but Colleen needed to see me urgently. We had a meeting place, a tryst-hole, the wooden kissing-gate at the entrance to the woods, up near the old All-Nite Milk Bar.

  I walked there, shivering in my T-shirt. My hands were shaking, because I knew what she was going to tell me. I couldn’t think straight. She was waiting by the kissing-gate, staring into the dark woods. She wouldn’t look me in the eye.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “That’s what Mum said. Jesus, Mary and Joseph.”

  “You told her? Has she told your old man?” I shook her. She was crying.

  “Not yet. But she will. I can’t go back there! I can’t!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can’t! I can’t!”

  But I knew what she meant. The bruises from her last round with the old bastard had only just faded. I needed to think but nothing was coming into my head.

  I slumped down on the grass and tried to light up a snout, but I couldn’t get the match to come into contact with the cigarette. I had this notion that life ended as soon as you became a parent. I wasn’t even eighteen. This wasn’t the spiral path. There was my college. There was all of life. I wasn’t ready.

  “You’ll have to get rid of it.”

  “Bastard,” she said. Only two weeks earlier I’d told her I’d love her forever, we were locked in the same spiral, the same pressing, might as well accept it beginning to end.

  “What else can we do? I’ve got my life to live. You’ve got yours. What do you expect?”

  It was as if I’d plunged a knife into her breast. She collapsed on to the grass, gasping and wailing and hugging herself so hard I thought she might crack a rib. I’d never in my life seen such a ferocious fit of sobbing. “I’m a Catholic,” she kept crying, “I’m a Catholic.”

  I told her I took back everything I’d said, and that I’d do anything she wanted if only she’d stop crying like that. I seriously thought she was in danger. After a long while the fit subsided, and I held her. I couldn’t take her to her own house, and I couldn’t take her to mine: Colleen’s parents were probably at my house even at that moment, creating hysterical scenes. I had an idea.

  Colleen let me lead her around the back of the milk bar. It was all nailed up tight but I managed to prise open a board and lever it from the window frame. There was an almighty cracking sound as it came away, but no one else was around. We climbed in.

  It was dark. There was a musty, earthy smell to the property. I did my best to replace the board behind us.

  It had been only a couple of months since Dermott died, yet the place smelled like it had been shut up for years. Everything was draped in ghostly white dust-sheets. I tried a light switch, but the juice was off. Anyway, the lights would have been seen from the road, and I had an idea we might even be able to spend a few days there. I found a couple of candle stubs behind the counter and they gave us enough light to get comfortable. I pulled some dust-sheets off the stacked stools and the Wurlitzer, and did my best to make a bed out of them.

  I was still making a thousand unkeepable promises to Colleen. She snuffled and looked at me without saying anything. Her nose was sore from wiping. I hunted round for something to eat or drink, anything to comfort her, but all the stock had been cleared. The candlelight danced over the settled white dust. I snuggled down beside Colleen, putting my arm around her, wondering what the hell we were going to do and staring into the darkness of the milk bar for an answer that never came.

  We heard someone’s steps outside, and I snuffed out the candle. We sat in complete darkness until long after they’d gone. It was way after midnight. Maybe it was just someone walking their dog, but the thought of prowlers had us spooked.

  We tried to get some sleep but the place was full of creaks. The wind moaned outside, rattling the wood-built milk bar and slapping the loose board where we’d forced an entry.

  “I’m scared,” said Colleen.

  “Don’t be. We’re safe here.”

  “Not for this. For everything.”

  I was about to light the candle again when it happened.

  The Wurlitzer lit up.

  The juice was switched off; I’d already checked. Yet the Wurlitzer was lighting up in the dark like a firework display.

  First a starburst of red illuminated the milk bar, followed by a wash of blue light. Pools of color rippled across the floor. Then the soft amber lights under the canopy flickered on, neon worms fizzing as they spelled out Wurlitzer in crazy, dislocated style. I heard Colleen gasp. We stared at the machine, huddled together, seeming to shrink in size as the Wurlitzer floated before us in the dark like some massive spaceship.

  There was a moment of suffocating tension. Then the Wurlitzer kicked. I knew every sound that was coming. It clicked; it whirred; it chucked. It was like machinery working in my guts. I heard the carousel move. Then there was another click, and a loud hissing. Freezing wings brushed my neck. At that moment I did indeed feel like my whole life was a pressed disc, and that I’d been down this way many, many times before, and that every new time was nothing more than a cover version of the same experience: same beginning, same ending, and the same inscrutable, terrifying hole at the end of the spiraling groove. There it was, doom-laden, echoing in chambers of the mind, the old whorehouse lament.

  And it’s been the ruin of many a poor boy

  And God I know I’m one.

  Colleen and I stared in horrible, frozen awe at the pulsating Wurlitzer. Its sound swamped the empty milk bar, loud enough to vibrate the glass windows, loud enough to shake Dermott in his grave. I remembered when I was a kid again, listening to music carried on the back of spirits.

  Then it stopped. The colored lights died. We were in darkness again.

  We got out quick, same way as we’d got in. “But who’s it for?” Colleen said. “You or me?”

  Then we spent three dreadful hours sitting in a bus shelter until the dawn chorus started. Colleen had a couple of friends with a bedsit in town, and she decided to see if they’d let her stay until she could find somewhere. I didn’t want to let her, but she insisted on going alone.

  I eventually found the address and went up there myself. A girl with a towel around her head came to the door and told me Colleen wasn’t in, but I knew she was lying. I could feel her presence behind the door.

  I was walking up by the kissing-gate one evening when I saw Tony and Francis.

  “She won’t see me. She won’t have anything to do with me.”

  “I wish she would,” said Francis.

  “How is she?”

 
; “Doing far too much powder these days. I don’t like it.”

  “Tell her, will you, Francis?”

  “Tell her what?”

  “Just tell her.”

  Then I heard. I heard before that stupid story got into the papers. She thought she was an orange and tried to peel herself. That was the garbage that got written up in the Evening Post. They didn’t have to write it like that. They could have just said it as it was.

  Colleen was too clever to believe any of my promises. She saw only one way out, and she took it. My God she didn’t have to die. It was that fucking banshee jukebox. I should have told her it had already had its victim with Dermott. He just hadn’t let it play out the night before he died. It wasn’t in the pressing. She didn’t have to do it.

  Her folks wouldn’t even let me go to the funeral. They blamed it on me. I watched it all from a distance; I didn’t need to go and eat a pickle sandwich with people like that. I could do my own crying.

  The night of her funeral I went back to the milk bar with a can of petrol. I climbed in the same way as before. I doused the Wurlitzer, and the petrol ran down the glass canopy and between the button bank. Something touched on. A green light winked, inviting me to MAKE SELECTION. I could almost have smiled.

  I flung the rest of the petrol around the milk bar. I wanted the whole lot to go up, but first I had one last thing to do. I tapped out the buttons I knew by heart. Kick. Click; whirr. Pause. Chuck; hiss. Jangling chords. Growling vocals. Just like it had always been.

  They call The Rising Sun.

  Then I lit up. The Wurlitzer exploded into flame six feet high. The fire raced around the floor and up the walls of the wooden shack milk bar. It went up like tinder. I must have spilled petrol on myself, because I felt my jeans and my jacket burning, before I felt my hair on fire. I remember writhing around the floor, frantically trying to tear myself out of my clothes, but rolling into more flame. The Wurlitzer was still belting out those moondog lyrics at high volume, loud over the crackle and roar of the flame.

  So Mother tell your children

  Not to do what I have done

  I kicked at the boarded doors of the bar, splintering wood and smashing glass, finally flinging myself outside and away from the scorching heat and smoke. I could still hear “House” ringing in my ears as I blacked out. I don’t remember anything after that.

  They took off some of the bandages yesterday. I made them hold a mirror up to my face. One eye looks something like a charred walnut, but I can still see through the other one. They said I was lucky.

  I have to ask myself if I called up my own misfortune by that perverse act of playing “House” one last time. Perhaps that wasn’t in the pressing. Maybe next time I won’t get fried to a crisp. Maybe Colleen doesn’t have to die. Maybe we can make a new cover version where none of that happens. Whatever, I can wait for the next play.

  As a schoolboy in a mining village on the western side of Coventry, Graham Joyce’s first efforts as a writer were reports of Coventry City FC football games. He later found inspiration in rock and roll lyrics. Before he became an acclaimed, award-winning novelist, he was a youth worker who believed “you can talk about sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll to young people because they’re immediately interested in those things. In those three issues there are as many moral questions to be addressed as you can find anywhere in the world. So that was the agenda: to find a way through the moral maze of sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll. I don’t know what I gave the kids, but I’m still stuck in the maze myself, trying to write my way out.” “Last Rising Sun” was, in 1992, his first published short story. His twentieth novel, Some Kind of Fairy Tale was published earlier this year. See www.grahamjoyce.co.uk for more information.

  Freezone

  John Shirley

  Freezone floated in the Atlantic Ocean, a city afloat in the wash of international cultural confluence.

  The city was anchored about a hundred miles north of Sidi Ifni, a drowsy city on the coast of Morocco in a warm, gentle current, and in a sector of the sea only rarely troubled by large storms. What storms arose here spent their fury on the maze of concrete wave-baffles Freezone Admin had spent years building up around the artificial island.

  But the affluent could feel the crumbling of their kingdom. They didn’t feel safe in the States. They needed someplace outside, somewhere controlled. Europe was out now; Central and South America, too risky. The Pacific theater was another war zone.

  So that’s where Freezone came in.

  The community was now seventeen square miles of urban raft protected with one of the meanest security forces in the world. Freezone dealt in pleasant distractions for the rich in the exclusive section and—in the second-string places around the edge—for technickis from the drill rigs. And the second-string places sheltered a few thousand semi-illicit hangers-on, and a few hundred performers.

  Like Rickenharp.

  Rick Rickenharp stood against the south wall of the Semiconductor, letting the club’s glare and blare wash over him, and mentally writing a song. The song went something like, “Glaring blare, lightning stare/Nostalgia for the electric chair.”

  Then he thought, Fucking drivel.

  All the while he was doing his best to look cool but vulnerable, hoping one of the girls flashing through the crowd would remember having seen him in the band the night before, would try to chat him up, play groupie. But they were mostly into wifi dancers.

  And no fucking way Rickenharp was going to wire into minimono.

  Rickenharp was a rock classicist; he was retro. He wore a black leather motorcycle jacket that was some seventy-some years old, said to have been worn by John Cale when he was still in the Velvet Underground. The seams were beginning to pop for the third time; three studs were missing from the chrome trimming. The elbows and collar edges were worn through the black dye to the brown animal the leather had come from. But the leather was second skin to Rickenharp. He wore nothing under it. His bony, hairless chest showed translucent-bluewhite between the broken zippers. He wore blue jeans that were only ten years old but looked older than the coat; he wore genuine Harley Davidson boots. Earrings clustered up and down his long, slightly too prominent ears, and his rusty brown hair looked like a cannon-shell explosion.

  And he wore dark glasses.

  And he did all this because it was gratingly unfashionable.

  His band hassled him about it. They wanted their lead-git and frontman minimono.

  “If we’re gonna go minimono, we oughta just sell the fucking guitars and go wires,” Rickenharp had told them.

  And the drummer had been stupid and tactless enough to say, “Well, fuck, man, maybe we should go to wires.”

  Rickenharp had said, “Maybe we should get a fucking drum machine, too, you fucking Neanderthal!” and kicked the drum seat over, sending Murch into the cymbals with a fine crashing, so that Rickenharp added, “you should get that good a sound outta those cymbals on stage. Now we know how to do it.”

  Murch had started to throw his sticks at him, but then he’d remembered how you had to have them lathed up special because they didn’t make them anymore, so he’d said, “Suck my ass, big shot,” and got up and walked out, not the first time. But that was the first time it meant anything, and only some heavy ambassadorial action on the part of Ponce had kept Murch from leaving the band.

  The call from their agent had set the whole thing off. That’s what it really was. Agency was streamlining its clientele. The band was out. The last two albums hadn’t sold, and in fact the engineers claimed that live drums didn’t digitize well onto the miniaturized soundcaps that passed for CDs now. Rickenharp’s holovid and the videos weren’t getting much airplay.

  Anyway, Vid-Co was probably going out of business. Another business sucked into the black hole of the depression. “So it ain’t our fault the stuff’s not selling,” Rickenharp said. “We got fans but we can’t get the distribution to reach ’em.”

  Mose had said, “Bulls
hit, we’re out of the Grid, and you know it. All that was carrying us was the nostalgia wave anyway. You can’t get more’n two bits out of a revival, man.”

  Julio the bassist had said something in technicki which Rickenharp hadn’t bothered to translate because it was probably stupid and when Rickenharp had ignored him he’d gotten pissed and it was his turn to walk out. Fucking touchy technickis anyway.

  And now the band was in abeyance. Their train was stopped between the stations. They had one gig, just one: opening for a wifi act. And Rickenharp didn’t want to do it. But they had a contract and there were a lot of rock nostalgia freaks on Freezone, so maybe that was their audience anyway and he owed it to them. Blow the goddamn wires off the stage.

  He looked around the Semiconductor and wished the Retro-Club was still open. There’d been a strong retro presence at the RC, even some rockabillies, and some of the rockabillies actually knew what rockabilly sounded like. The Semiconductor was a minimono scene.

  The minimono crowd wore their hair long, fanned out between the shoulders and narrowing to a point at the crown of the head, and straight, absolutely straight, stiff, so from the back each head had a black or gray or red or white teepee-shape. Those, in monochrome, were the only acceptable colors. Flat tones and no streaks. Their clothes were stylistic extensions of their hairstyles. Minimono was a reaction to Flare—and to the chaos of the war, and the war economy, and the amorphous shifting of the Grid. The Flare style was going, dying.

  Rickenharp had always been contemptuous of the trendy Flares, but he preferred them to minimono. Flare had energy, anyway.

  A flare was expected to wear his hair up, as far over the top of his head as possible, and that promontory was supposed to express. The more colors the better. In that scene, you weren’t an individual unless you had an expressive flare. Screwshapes, hooks, aureola shapes, layered multicolor snarls. Fortunes were made in flare hair-shaping shops, and lost when it began to go out of fashion. But it had lasted longer than most fashions; it had endless variation and the appeal of its energy to sustain it. A lot of people copped out of the necessity of inventing individual expression by adopting a politically standard flare. Shape your hair like the insignia for your favorite downtrodden third world country (back when they were downtrodden, before the new marketing axis). Flares were so much trouble most people took to having flare wigs. And their drugs were styled to fit the fashion. Excitative neurotransmitters; drugs that made you seem to glow. The wealthier flares had nimbus belts, creating artificial auroras. The hipper flares considered this to be tastelessly narcissistic, which was a joke to nonflares, since all flares were floridly vain.