Rickenharp had never colored or shaped his hair, except to encourage its punk spikiness.
But Rickenharp wasn’t a punkrocker. He identified with prepunk, late 1950s, mid-1960s, early 1970s. Rickenharp was a proud anachronism. He was simply a hard-core rocker, as out of place in the Semiconductor as bebop would have been in the 1980s dance clubs.
Rickenharp looked around at the flat-back, flat-gray, monochrome tunics and jumpsuits, the black wristfones, the cookie-cutter sameness of JAS’s; at the uniform tans and ubiquitous FirStep Colony-shaped earrings (only one, always in the left ear). The high-tech-fetishist minimonos were said to aspire toward a place in the Colony the way Rastas had dreamed of a return to Ethiopia. Rickenharp thought it was funny that the Russians had blockaded the Colony. Funny to see the normally dronelike, antiflamboyant minimonos quietly simmering on ampheticool, standing in tense groups, hissing about the Russian blockade of FirStep, in why-doesn’t-someone-do-something outrage.
The stultifying regularity of their canned music banged from the walls and pulsed from the floor. Lean against the wall and you felt a drill-bit vibration of it in your spine.
There were a few hardy, defiant flares here, and flares were Rickenharp’s best hope for getting laid. They tended to respect old rock.
The music ceased; a voice boomed, “Joel NewHope!” and spots hit the stage. The first wifi act had come on. Rickenharp glanced at his watch. It was ten. He was due to open for the headline act at 11:30. Rickenharp pictured the club emptying as he hit the stage. He wasn’t long for this club.
NewHope hit the stage. He was anorexic and surgically sexless: radical minimono. A fact advertised by his nudity: he wore only gray and black spray-on sheathing, his dick in a drag queen’s tuck. How did the guy piss? Rickenharp, wondered. Maybe it was out of that faint crease at his crotch. A dancing mannequin. His sexuality was clipped to the back of his head: a single chrome electrode that activated the pleasure center of the brain during the weekly legally controlled catharsis. But he was so skinny—hey, who knows, maybe he went to a black-market cerebrostim to interface with the pulser. Though minimonos were supposed to be into stringent law and order.
The neural transmitters jacked into NewHope’s arms and legs and torso transmitted to pickups on the stage floor. The long, funereal wails pealing from hidden speakers were triggered by the muscular contractions of his arms and legs and torso. He wasn’t bad, for a minimono, Rickenharp thought. You can make out the melody, the tune shaped by his dancing, and it had a shade more complexity than the M’n’Ms usually had . . . The M’n’M crowd moved into their geometrical dance configurations, somewhere between disco dancing and square dance, Busby Berkley kaleidoscopings worked out according to formulas you were simply expected to know, if you had the nerve to participate. Try to dance freestyle in their interlocking choreography, and sheer social rejection, on the wings of body language, would hit you like an arctic wind.
Sometimes Rickenharp did an acid dance in the midst of the minimono configuration, just for the hell of it, just to revel in their rejection. But his band had made him stop that. Don’t alienate the audience at our only gig, man. Probably our last fucking gig . . .
The wiredancer rippled out bagpipelike riffs over the digitalized rhythm section. The walls came alive.
A good rock club—in 1965 or 1975 or 1985 or 1995 or 2012 or 2039 should be narrow, dark, close, claustrophobic. The walls should be either starkly monochrome—all black or mirrored, say—or deliberately garish. Camp, layered with whatever was the contemporary avant-garde or gaudy graffiti.
The Semiconductor showed both sides. It started out butch, its walls glassy black; during the concert it went in gaudy drag as the sound-sensitive walls reacted to the music with color streaking, wavelengthing in oscilloscope patterns, shades of blue-white for high end, red and purple for bass and percussion, reacting vividly, hypnotically to each note. The minimonos disliked reactive walls. They called it kitschy.
The dance spazzed the stage, and Rickenharp grudgingly watched, trying to be fair to it. Thinking, It’s another kind of rock ’n’ roll, is all. Like a Christian watching a Buddhist ceremony, telling himself, “Oh, well, it’s all manifestations of the One God in the end.” Rickenharp thinking: But real rock is better. Real rock is coming back, he’d tell almost anyone who’d listen. Almost no one would.
A chaotichick came in, and he watched her, feeling less alone. Chaotics were much closer to real rockers. She was a skinhead, with the sides of her head painted. The Gridfriend insignia was tattooed on her right shoulder. She wore a skirt made of at least two hundred rags of synthetic material sewn to her leather belt—a sort of grass skirt of bright rags. The nipples of her bare breasts were pierced with thin screws. The minimonos looked at her in disgust; they were prudish, and calling attention to one’s breasts was decidedly gauche with the M’n’Ms. She smiled sunnily back at them. Her handsome Semitic features were slashed randomly with paint. Her makeup looked like a spinpainting. Her teeth were filed.
Rickenharp swallowed hard, looking at her. Damn. She was his type.
Only . . . she wore a blue-mesc sniffer. The sniffer’s inverted question mark ran from its hook at her right ear to just under her right nostril. Now and then she tilted her head to it, and sniffed a little blue powder.
Rickenharp had to look away. Silently cursing.
He’d just written a song called “Stay Clean.”
Blue mesc. Or syncoke. Or heroin. Or amphetamorphine. Or XTZ. But mostly he went for blue mesc. And blue mesc was addictive.
Blue mesc, also called boss blue. It offered some of the effects of mescaline and cocaine together, framed in the gelatinous sweetness of methaqualone. Only . . . stop taking it after a period of steady use and the world drained of meaning for you. There was no actual withdrawal sickness. There was only a deeply resonant depression, a sense of worthlessness that seemed to settle like dust and maggot dung into each individual cell of the user’s body.
Some people called blue mesc “the suicide ticket.” It could make you feel like a coal miner when the mineshaft caved in, only you were buried in yourself.
Rickenharp had squandered the money from his only major microdisc hit on boss blue and synthmorph. He’d just barely made it clean. And lately, at least before the band squabbles, he’d begun feeling like life was worth living again.
Watching the girl with the sniffer walk past, watching her use, Rickenharp felt stricken, lost, as if he’d seen something to remind him of a lost lover. An ex-user’s syndrome. Pain from guilt of having jilted your drug.
And he could imagine the sweet burn of the stuff in his nostrils, the backward-sweet pharmaceutical taste of it in the back of his palate; the rush; the autoerotic feedback loop of blue mesc. Imagining it, he had a shadow of the sensation, a tantalizing ghost of the rush. In memory he could taste it, smell it, feel it . . . Seeing her use brought back a hundred iridescent memories and with them came an almost irrepressible longing. (While some small voice in the back of his head tried to get his attention, tried to warn him, Hey, remember the shit makes you want to kill yourself when you run out; remember it makes you stupidly overconfident and boorish; remember it eats your internal organs . . . a small, dwindling voice . . . )
The girl was looking at him. There was a flicker of invitation in her eyes.
He wavered.
The small voice got louder.
Rickenharp, if you go to her, go with her, you’ll end up using.
He turned away with an anguished internal wrenching. Stumbled through the wash of sounds and lights and monochrome people to the dressing room; to guitar and earphones and the safer sonic world.
Rickenharp was listening to a collector’s item Velvet Underground tape, from 1968. It was capped into his Earmite. The song was “White Light/White Heat.” The guitarists were doing things that would make Baron Frankenstein say, “There are some things man was not meant to know.” He screwed the Earmite a little deeper so that the vibrations would
shiver the bone around his ear, give him chills, chills that lapped through him in harmony with the guitar chords. He’d picked a visorclip to go with the music: a muted documentary on expressionist painters. Listening to the Velvets and looking at Edvard Munch. Man!
And then Julio dug a finger into his shoulder.
“Happiness is fleeting,” Rickenharp muttered, as he flipped the visorclip back. Some visors came with camera eye and fieldstim. The fieldstim you wore snugged to the skin, as if it were a sheer corset. The camera picked up an image of the street you were walking down and routed it to the fieldstim, which tickled your back in the pattern of whatever the camera saw. Some part of your mind assembled a rough image of the street out of that. Developed for blind people in the 1980s. Now used by viddy addicts who walked or drove the streets wearing visors, watching TV, reflexively navigating by using the fieldstim, their eyes blocked off by the screen but never quite bumping into anyone. But Rickenharp didn’t use a fieldstim.
So he had to look at Julio with his own eyes. “What do YOU want?”
“N’ten,” Julio said. Julio the technicki bassist. They went on in ten minutes.
Mose, Ponce, Julio, Murch. Rhythm guitar backup vocals. Keyboards. Bass. Drums.
Rickenharp nodded and reached up to flip the visor back in place, but Ponce flicked the switch on the visor’s headset. The visor image shrank like a landscape vanishing down a tunnel behind a train, and Rickenharp felt like his stomach was shrinking inside him at the same rate. He knew what was coming down. “Okay,” he said, turning to look at them. “What?”
They were in the dressing room. The walls were black with graffiti. All rock club dressing rooms will always be black with graffiti; flayed with it, scourged with it. Like the flat declaration THE PARASITES RULE, the cheerful petulance of symbiosis THE SCREAMIN’ GEEZERS GOT FUCKING BORED HERE, the oblique existentialism of THE ALKOLOID BROTHERS LOVE YOU ALL BUT THINK YOU WOULD BE BETTER OFF DEAD, and the enigmatic ones like SYNC 66 CLICKS NOW. It looked like the patterning of badly wrinkled wallpaper. It was in layers; it was a palimpsest. Hallucinatory stylization as if tracing the electron firings of the visual cortex.
The walls, in the few places they were visible under the graffiti, were a gray-painted pressboard. There was just enough room for Rickenharp’s band, sitting around on broken-backed kitchen chairs and one desk chair with three legs. Crowded between the chairs were instruments in their cases. The edges of the cases were false leather peeling away. Half the snaps broken.
Rickenharp looked at the band, looked clockwise one face to the next, taking a poll from their expressions: Mose on his left, a bruised look to his eyes; his hair a triple-Mohawk, the center spine red, the outer two white and blue; a smoky crystal ring on his left index finger that matched—he knew it matched—his smoky crystal amber eyes. Rickenharp and Mose had been close. Each looked at the other a little accusingly. There was a lover’s sulkiness between them, though they’d never been lovers. Mose was hurt because Rickenharp didn’t want to make the transition: Rickenharp was putting his own taste in music before the survival of the band. Rickenharp was hurt because Mose wanted to go minimono wifi act, a betrayal of the spiritual ethos of the band; and because Mose was willing to sacrifice Rickenharp. Replace him with a wire dancer. They both knew it, though it had never been said. Most of what passed between them was semiotically transmitted with the studied indirection of the terminally cool.
Tonight, Mose looked like serious bad news. His head was tilted as if his neck were broken, his eyes lusterless.
Ponce had gone minimono, at least in his look, and they’d had a ferocious fight over that. Ponce was slender—like everyone in the band—and fox-faced, and now he was sprayed battleship gray from head to toe, including hair and skin. In the smoky atmosphere of the clubs he sometimes vanished completely.
He wore silver contact lenses. Flat-out glum, he stared at a ten-slivered funhouse reflection in his mirrored fingernails.
Julio, yeah, he liked to give Rickenharp shit, and he wanted the change-up. Sure, he was loyal to Rickenharp, up to a point. But he was also a conformist. He’d argue for Rickenharp maybe, but he’d go with the consensus. Julio had lush curly black Puerto Rican hair piled prowlike over his head. He had a woman’s profile and a woman’s long-lashed eyes. He had a silver-stud earring, and wore classic retro-rock black leather like Rickenharp. He twisted the skull-ring on his thumb, returning a scowl for its grin, staring at it as if deeply worried that one of its ruby-red glass eyes was about to come out.
Murch was a thick slug of a guy with a glass crew cut. He was a mediocre drummer, but he was a drummer, with a trap set and everything, a species of musician almost extinct. “Murch’s rare as a dodo,” Rickenharp said once, “and that’s not all he’s got in common with a dodo.” Murch wore horn-rimmed dark glasses, and he was holding a bottle of Jack Daniels on his knee. The Jack Daniels was a part of his outfit. It went with his cowboy boots, or so he thought.
Murch was looking at Rickenharp in open contempt. He didn’t have the brains to dissemble.
“Fuck you, Murch,” Rickenharp said.
“Whuh? I didn’t say nothing.”
“You don’t have to. I can smell your thoughts. Enough to gag a faggot maggot.” Rickenharp stood and looked at the others. “I know what’s on your mind. Give me this: one last good gig. After that you can have it how you want.”
Tension lifted its wings and flew away.
Another bird settled over the room. Rickenharp saw it in his mind’s eye: a thunderbird. Half made of an Indian teepee painting of a thunderbird, and half of chrome T-Bird car parts. When it spread its wings the pinfeathers glistened like polished bumpers. There were two headlights on its chest, and when the band picked up their instruments to go out to the stage, the headlights switched on.
Rickenharp carried his Stratocaster in its black case. The case was bandaged with duct tape and peeling with faded stickers. But the Strat was spotless. It was transparent. Its lines curved hot like a sports car.
They walked down a white plastibrick corridor toward the stage. The corridor narrowed after the first turn, so they had to walk sideways, holding the instruments out in front of them. Space was precious on Freezone.
The stagehand saw Murch go out first, and he signaled the DJ, who cut the canned music and announced the band through the PA. Old-fashioned, like Rickenharp requested: “Please welcome . . . Rickenharp.”
There was no answering roar from the crowd. There were a few catcalls and a smattering of applause.
Good, you bitch, fight me, Rickenharp thought, waiting for the band to take up their positions. He’d go on stage last, after they’d set up the spot for him. Always.
Rickenharp squinted from the wings to see past the glare of lights into the dark snakepit of the audience. Only about half minimono now. That was good, that gave him a chance to put this one over.
The band took its place, pressed their automatic tuners, fiddled with dials.
Rickenharp was pleasantly surprised to see that the stage was lit with soft red floods, which is what he’d requested. Maybe the lighting director was one of his fans. Maybe the band wouldn’t fuck this one up. Maybe everything would fall into place. Maybe the lock on the cage door would tumble into the right combination, the cage door would open, the T-Bird would fly.
He could hear some of the audience whispering about Murch. Most of them had never seen a live drummer before, except for salsa. Rickenharp caught a scrap of technicki: “Whuzziemackzut?” What’s he making with that, meaning: What are those things he’s adjusting? The drums.
Rickenharp took the Strat out of its case and strapped it on. He adjusted the strap, pressed the tuner. When he walked onto the stage, the amp’s reception field would trigger, transmit the Strat’s signals to the stack of Marshalls behind the drummer. A shame, in a way, about miniaturization of electronics: the amps were small, though just as loud as twentieth century amps and speakers. But they looked less imposing. The audience was
muttering about the Marshalls, too. Most of them hadn’t seen old-fashioned amps. “What’s those for?” Murch looked at Rickenharp. Rickenharp nodded.
Murch thudded 4/4, alone for a moment. Then the bass took it up, laid down a sonic strata that was kind of off-center strutting. And the keyboards laid down sheets of infinity.
Now he could walk on stage. It was like there’d been an abyss between Rickenharp and the stage, and the bass and drum and keyboards working together made a bridge to cross the abyss. He walked over the bridge and into the warmth of the floods. He could feel the heat of the lights on his skin. It was like stepping from an air-conditioned room into the tropics. The music suffered deliciously in a tropical lushness. The pure white spotlight caught and held him, focusing on his guitar, as per his directions, and he thought, Good, the lighting guy really is with me.
He felt as if he could feel what the guitar felt. The guitar ached to be touched.
Without consciously knowing it, Rickenharp was moving to the music. Not too much. Not in the pushy, look-at-me way that some performers had. The way they had of trying to force enthusiasm from the audience, every move looking artificial.
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