Rock On

by Howard Waldrop

  No, Rickenharp was a natural. The music flowed through him physically, unimpeded by anxieties or ego knots. His ego was there: it was the fuel for his personal Olympics torch. But it was also as immaculate as a pontiff’s robes.

  The band sensed it: Rickenharp was in rare form tonight. Maybe it was because he was freed. The tensions were gone because he knew this was the end of the line: the band had received its death sentence: Now, Rickenharp was as unafraid as a true suicide. He had the courage of despair.

  The band sensed it and let it happen. The chemistry was there, this time, when Ponce and Mose came into the verse section. Mose with a sinuous riffing picked low, almost on the chrome-plate that clamped the strings; Ponce with a magnificently redundant theme washed through the brass mode of the synthesizer. The whole band felt the chemistry like a pleasing electric shock, the pleasurable shock of individual egos becoming a group ego.

  The audience was listening, but they were also resisting. They didn’t want to like it. Still, the place was crowded—because of the club’s rep, not because of Rickenharp—and all those packed-in bodies make a kind of sensitive atmospheric exo-skeleton, and he knew that made them vulnerable. He knew what to touch.

  Feeling the Good Thing begin to happen, Rickenharp looked confident but not quite arrogant—he was too arrogant to show arrogance.

  The audience looked at Rickenharp as a man will look at a smug adversary just before a hand-to-hand fight and wonder, “Why’s he so smug, what does he know?”

  He knew about timing. And he knew there were feelings even the most aloof among them couldn’t control, once those feelings were released: and he knew how to release them.

  Rickenharp hit a chord. He let it shimmer through the room and he looked out at them. He made eye contact.

  He liked seeing the defiant stares, because that was going to make his victory more complete.

  Because he knew. He’d played five gigs with the band in the last two weeks, and for all five gigs the atmosphere had been strained, the electricity hadn’t been there; like a Jacob’s ladder where the two poles aren’t properly lined up for the sparks to jump.

  And like sexual energy, it had built up in them, dammed behind their private resentments; and now it was pouring through the dam, and the band shook with the release of it as Rickenharp thundered into his progression and began to sing . . .

  Strumming over the vocals, he sang,

  And for me, yeah for me

  PAIN IS EVERYTHING!

  Pain is all there is

  Babe take some of mine

  or lick some of his

  PAIN IS EVERYTHING!

  Pain is all there is

  Babe take some of mine . . .

  Singing it insolently, half shouting, half warbling at the end of each note, with that fuck-you tone, performing that magic act: shouting a melody. He could see doors opening in their faces, even the minimonos, even the neutrals, all the flares, the rebs, the chaotics, the preps, the retros. Forgetting their subcultural classifications in the unification of the music. He was basted in sweat under the lights, he was squeezing sounds with his fingers and it was as if he could feel the sounds taking shape in his hands the way a sculptor feels clay under his fingers, and it was like there was no gap between his hearing the sound in his head and its coming out of the speakers. His brain, his body, his fingers had closed the gap, was one supercooled circuit breaker fused shut.

  Some part of him was looking through the crowd for the chaotichick he’d spotted earlier. He was faintly disappointed when he didn’t see her. He told himself, You ought to be happy, you had a narrow escape, she would’ve got you back into boss blue.

  But when he saw her press to the front and nod at him ever so slightly in that smug insider’s way, he was simply glad, and he wondered what his subconscious was planning for him . . . All those thoughts were flickers. Most of the time his conscious mind was completely focused on the sound, and the business of acting out the sound for the audience. He was playing out of sorrow, the sorrow of loss. His family was going to die, and he played tunes that touched the chord of loss, in everyone . . .

  And the band was supernaturally tight. The gestalt was there, uniting them, and he thought: The band feels good, but it’s not going to help when the gig’s over.

  It was like a divorced couple having a good time in bed but knowing that wouldn’t make the marriage right again; the good time was a function of having given up.

  But in the meantime there were fireworks.

  By the last tune in the set the electricity was so thick in the club that—as Mose had said once, with a rocker’s melodrama—“If you could cut it, it would bleed.” The dope and smashweed and tobacco smoke moiling the air seemed to conspire with the stage lights to create an atmosphere of magical apartness. With each song-keyed shift in the light, red to blue to white to sulfurous yellow, a corresponding emotional wavelength rippled through the room. The energy built, and Rickenharp discharged it, his Strat the lightning rod.

  And then the set ended.

  Rickenharp bashed out the last five notes alone, nailing a climax onto the air. Then he walked offstage, hardly hearing the roar from the crowd. He found himself half running down the white, grimy plastibrick corridor, and then he was in the dressing room and didn’t remember coming there. The graffiti seemed to writhe on the walls as if he’d taken a psychedelic. Everything felt more real than usual. His ears were ringing like Quasimodo’s belfry.

  He heard footsteps and turned, working up what he was going to say to the band. But it was the chaotichick and someone else, and then a third dude coming in after the someone else.

  The someone else was a skinny guy with brown hair that was naturally messy, not messy as part of one of the cultural subcurrents. His mouth hung a little ajar, and one of his incisors was decayed black. His nose was windburned and the back of his bony hands were gnarled with veins. The third dude was Japanese; small, brown-eyed, nondescript, his expression was mild, just a shade more friendly than neutral. The skinny Caucasian guy wore an army jacket sans insignia, shiny jeans, and rotting tennis shoes. His hands were nervous, like there was something he was used to holding in them that wasn’t there now. An instrument? Maybe.

  The Japanese guy wore a Japanese Action Suit—surprise, surprise—sky-blue and neat as a pin. There was a lump on his hip—something he could reach by putting his right arm across his body and through the open zipper down the front of the suit—and Rickenharp was pretty sure it was a gun.

  There was one thing all three of them had in common: they looked half-starved.

  Rickenharp shivered—his gloss of sweat cooling on him, but he forced himself to say, “Whusappnin’?” It was wooden in his mouth. He was looking past them, waiting for the band.

  “Band’s in the wings,” the chaotichick said. “The bass player said to tell you . . . well, it was Telm zassouter.”

  Rickenharp had to smile at her mock of Julio’s technicki. Tell him, get his ass out here.

  Then some of the druggy feeling washed away and he heard the shouts from the audience and he realized they wanted an encore.

  “Jeez, an encore,” he said without thinking. “Been so fucking long.”

  “ ’Ey mate,” the skinny guy said, pronouncing mate like mite. Brit or Aussie. “I saw you at Stone’enge five years ago when you ’ad yer second ’it.”

  Rickenharp winced a little when the guy said your second hit, inadvertently underlining the fact that Rickenharp had had only two, and everyone knew he wasn’t likely to have any more.

  “I’m Carmen,” the chaotichick said. “This is Willow and Yukio.” Yukio was standing sideways from the others, and something about the way he did it told Rickenharp he was watching down the corridor without seeming to.

  Carmen saw Rickenharp looking at Yukio and said, “Cops are coming down.”

  “Why?” Rickenharp asked. “The club’s licensed.”

  “Not for you or the club. For us.”

  He looked
at her and said, “Hey, I don’t need to get busted . . . ” He picked up his guitar and went into the hall. “I got to do my encore before they lose interest.”

  She followed along, into the hall and the echo of the encore stomps, and asked, “Can we hang out in the dressing room for a while?”

  “Yeah, but it ain’t sacrosanct. You come back here, the cops can, too.” They were in the wings now. Rickenharp signaled to Murch and the band started playing.

  Standing beside him, she said, “These aren’t exactly cops. They probably don’t know these kind of places, they’d look for us in the crowd, not the dressing room.”

  “You’re an optimist. I’ll tell the bouncer to stand here, and if he sees anyone else start to come back, he’ll tell ’em it’s empty back here ’cause he just checked. Might work, might not.”

  “Thanks.” She went back to the dressing room. He spoke to the bouncer and went on stage. Feeling drained, the guitar heavy on him. But he picked up on the energy level in the room and it carried him through two encores. He left them wanting more—and, sticky with sweat, walked back to his dressing room.

  They were still there. Carmen, Yukio, Willow.

  “Is there a stage door?” Yukio asked. “Into alley?”

  Rickenharp nodded. “Wait in the hall; I’ll come out and show you in a minute.”

  Yukio nodded, and they went into the hall. The band came in, filed past Carmen and Yukio and the Brit without much noticing them, assuming they were backstage hangout flotsam, except Murch stared at Carmen’s tits and swaggered a bit, twirling his drumsticks.

  The band sat around laughing in the dressing room, slapping palms, lighting several kinds of smokes. They didn’t offer Rickenharp any; they knew he didn’t use it.

  Rickenharp was packing his guitar away, when Mose said, “You blew good.”

  “You mean he gave you a good head?” Murch said, and Julio snickered.

  “Yeah,” Ponce said, “the guy gives a good head, good collarbone, good kidneys—”

  “Good kidneys? Rick sucks on your kidneys? I think I’m gonna puke.”

  And the usual puerile band banter because they were still high from a good set and putting off what they knew had to come, till Rickenharp said, “What you want to talk about, Mose?”

  Mose looked at him, and the others shut up.

  “I know there’s something on your mind,” Rickenharp said softly. “Something you haven’t come out with yet.”

  Mose said, “Well, it’s like—there’s an agent Ponce knows, and this guy could take us on. He’s a technicki agent and we’d be taking on a technicki circuit, but we’d work our way back from there, that’s a good base. But this guy says we have to get a wire act in.”

  “You guys been busy,” Rickenharp said, shutting the guitar case.

  Mose shrugged, “Hey, we ain’t been doing it behind your back; we didn’t hear from the guy till yesterday night. We didn’t have a real chance to talk to you till now, so, uh, we have the same personnel but we change costumes, change the band’s name, write new tunes.”

  “We’d lose it,” Rickenharp said. Feeling caved-in. “We’d lose the thing we got, doing that shit, because it’s all superimposed.”

  “Rickenharp—rock ’n’ roll is not a fucking religion,” Mose said.

  “No, it’s not a religion, it’s a way of life. Now, here’s my proposal: we write new songs in the same style as always. We did good tonight. It could be the beginning of a turnaround for us. We stay here, build on the base audience we established tonight.”

  It was like throwing coins into the Grand Canyon. You couldn’t even hear them hit bottom.

  The band just looked back at him.

  “Okay,” Rickenharp said. “Okay. We’ve been through this ten fucking times. Okay. That’s all.” He’d had an exit speech worked out for this moment, but it caught in his throat. He turned to Murch and said, “You think they’re going to keep you on, they tell you that? Bullshit! They’ll be doing it without a drummer, man. You better learn to program computers, fast.” Then he looked at Mose. “Fuck you, Mose.” He said it quietly.

  He turned to Julio, who was looking at the far wall as if to decipher some particularly cryptic piece of graffiti. “Julio, you can have my amp, I’ll be traveling light.”

  He turned and, carrying his guitar, walked out, leaving silence behind him.

  He nodded at Yukio and his friends and they followed him to the stage door. At the door, Carmen said, “Any chance you could help us find a little cover?”

  Rickenharp needed company, bad. He nodded and said, “Yeah, if you’ll gimme a hit of that blue boss.”

  She said, “Sure.” And they went into the alley.

  Rickenharp put on his dark glasses, because of the way the Walk tugged at him.

  The Walk wound through the interlinked Freezone outfloats for a half-mile, looping up and back, a hairpin canyon of arcades crusted with neon and glowflake, holos and screens. It was involuted, intensified by layering and a blaze of colored light.

  Stoned, very stoned: Rickenharp and Carmen walked together through the sticky-warm night, almost in step. Yukio walked behind, Willow ahead, and Rickenharp felt like part of a jungle patrol formation. And he had another feeling: that they were being followed, or watched. Maybe it was suggestion, from seeing Yukio and Willow glance over their shoulders now and then . . .

  Rickenharp felt a ripple of kinetic force under his feet, an arc of wallow moving in languid whiplash through the flexible streetstuff, telling him that the breakers were up today, the baffles around the artificial island feeling the strain.

  The arcades ran three levels above the narrow street; each level had its own sidewalk balcony; people stood at the railing to look down at the segmented snake of street traffic. The stack of arcades funneled a rich wash of scents to Rickenharp: the french-fry toastiness of the fast food; the sweet harshness of smashweed smoke, gyno-smoke, tobacco smoke—the cloy of perfumes; the mixed odors of fish-ka-bob stands, urine, rancid beer, popcorn, sea air; and the faint ozone smell of the small, eerily quiet electric cars jockeying on the street. His first time here, Rickenharp had thought the place smelled wrong for a red light cluster. “It’s wimpy,” he’d said. Then he’d realized he was missing the bass-bottom of carbon monoxides. There were no combustion cars on Freezone. Some parts of America still permitted pollutive, resource-greedy gasoline cars, and Rickenharp, being a retro, had preferred those places.

  The sounds splashed over Rickenharp in a warm wave of cultural fecundity; pop tunes from thudders and wrist-boxes swelled in volume as they passed, the guys exuding the music insignificant in comparison to the noise they carried, the skanky tripping of protosalsa or the calculatedly redundant pulse of minimono.

  Rickenharp and Carmen walked beneath a fiberglass arch—so covered with graffiti its original commemorative meaning was lost—and ambled down the milky walkway under the second-story arcade boardwalk. The multinational crowd thickened as they approached the heart of the Walk. The soft lights glowing upward from beneath the polystyrene walkway gave the crowd a 1940s-horror-movie look; even through the dark glasses the place tugged at Rickenharp with a thousand subliminal come-hithers.

  Rickenharp was still riding the blue mesc surf, but the wave was beginning to break; he could feel it crumbling under him. He looked at Carmen. She glanced back at him, and they understood one another. She looked around, then nodded toward the darkened doorway of a defunct movie theater, a trash-cluttered recess twenty feet off the street. They went into the doorway; Yukio and Willow stood with their backs to the door, blocking the view from the street, so that Rickenharp and Carmen could each do a double hit of blue mesc. There was a kind of little-kid pleasure in stepping into seclusion to do drugs, a rush of outlaw in-crowd romance to it. On the second sniff the graffiti on the pad-locked, fiberglass doors seemed to writhe with significance. “I’m running low,” Carmen said, checking her mesc bottle.

  “Running low on drugs? Whoever heard of tha
t happening?” Rickenharp said and they both burst in peals of laughter. His mind was racing now, and he felt himself click into the boss blue verbal mode. “You see that graffiti? You’re gonna die young because the ITE took the second half of your life. You know what that is? I didn’t know what ITE was till yesterday, I used to see those things and wonder and then somebody said—”

  “Immortality something or other,” she said, licking blue mesc off her sniffer.

  “Immortality Treatment Elite. Supposedly some people keeping an immortality treatment to themselves because the government doesn’t want the public to live too long and overpopulate the place. Another bullshit conspiracy theory.”

  “You don’t believe in conspiracies?”

  “I don’t know—some. Nothing that far-fetched. But—I think people are being manipulated all the time. Even here . . . this place tugs at you, you know. Like—”

  Willow said, “Right, we’ll ’ave our sociology class later children, you gotter? Where’s this place with the bloke can get us off the fooking island?”

  “Yeah, okay, come on,” Rickenharp said, leading them back into the flow of the crowd—but seamlessly picking up his blue mesc rap. “I mean, this place is a Times Square, right? You ever read the old novels about that place? That was the archetype. Or some places in Bangkok. I mean, these places are carefully arranged. Maybe subconsciously. But arranged as carefully as Japanese florals, only with the inverse esthetic. Sure, every whining, self-righteous tightassed evangelist who ever preached the diabolic seductiveness of places like this was right—in a way—was fully justified ’cause, yeah, the places titillate and they seduce and they vampirize people. Yeah, they’re Venus’s-flytraps. Architectural Svengalis. Yes to all the clichés about the bad part of town. All the reverend preachers—Reverend who, Reverend—what’s his name?—Rick Crandall . . . ”

  She looked sharply at him. He wondered why but the mesc swept him on.

  “All the preachers are right, but the reason they’re right is why they’re wrong, too. Everything here is trying to sell you something. Lots of lights and whirligig suction to seduce you into throwing your energy into it—in the form of money. People mostly come here to buy or to be titillated up to the verge of buying. The tension between wanting to buy and the resistance to buying can give you a charge. That’s what I get into: I let it tickle my glands, but I hold back from paying into it. You know? Just constant titillation but no orgasm, because you waste your money or you get a social disease or mugged or sold bad drugs or something . . . I mean, anything sold here is pointless bullshit. But it’s harder for me to resist tonight . . . ” Because I’m stoned. “Makes you susceptible. Receptive to subliminals worked into the design of the signs, that gaudy kinetics, those fucking on/off bulbs—makes you flash on the old computer-thinking models, binomial thinking, on-off, on-off, blink blink—all those neon tubes, pulling you like the hypnotist’s spiral pendant in the old movies . . . And the kinds of colors they use, the energy of the signs, the rate of pulse, the rate of on/offing in the bulbs, all of it’s engineered according to principles of psychology the people who make them don’t even know they’re using, colors that hint about, you know, glandular discharges and tingly chemical flows to the pleasure center . . . like obscenities you pay for in the painted mouth of a whore . . . like video games . . . I mean—”