God Drug

by Stephen L. Antczak

  “It’s Jo… Hanna,” she said.

  “Johanna?” Tom repeated. “Interesting name.”

  “No, it’s just Hanna,” the tall girl said. “Hanna, without the Jo.”

  “Well, nice to meet you, Hanna,” Sparrow said, offering her hand.

  Hanna regarded Sparrow’s hand with an expression of awe mixed with fear. She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them and grabbed Sparrow’s hand in a firm handshake.

  “I’m Tom,” Tom said, grabbing Hanna’s hand as soon as Sparrow let it go, and bringing it to his mouth to kiss it in a gallant gesture.

  “Lena,” Lena said with a small wave of her hand.

  “New in town?” Sparrow asked Hanna.

  “Yeah, sort of.”

  “Where from?” Tom asked.

  “The Big Peach,” Hanna answered dryly.

  “Is that Atlanta?” Lena asked.

  Hanna nodded.

  “Sparrow!!” Dev’s voice suddenly boomed over the PA. “Let’s go!”

  “Time to rock,” Sparrow said. She took her beer up to the stage.

  The Chix cranked up their amps. Sparrow turned to face the band and said something no one else could hear, but the other Chix nodded. Dev started the first song of the set with slow, melodic strumming. Nicola complemented that with light tapping on the high-hat cymbals, while Sin softly played a solitary note over and over on the bass. Sparrow spun slowly around and around, arms outstretched, eyes closed, looking peaceful. Gradually it all built, got subtly louder and faster until Nicola slammed her sticks on the tom and Dev stepped on her fuzz box and sank her guitar into a roiling sea of distortion. Sin’s bass bellowed like a sea monster as she joined the rest of the Chix in taking the calm of Dave-O’s warehouse up a few notches to the level of a storm.

  Sparrow spun like a dervish, blonde hair whipping around, eyes still closed, spinning, spinning, spinning. She suddenly reached out to grab the mike, yanked it to her as she leaped into the air and came down on her knees. The fuzz stopped and the gentle strumming on the guitar, light tapping on the cymbals, and solitary bass note came back.

  “This song is for all my friends,” Sparrow said. “It’s called ‘Time to Go’.”

  “Seems like I’ve been living here most of my life,

  Like I’ve been balancing on the edge of a knife,

  I’ve been waiting for my life to begin,

  Wondering when my time here will end.

  How will I know?

  How will I know?”

  Dev’s guitar fuzz surged back as the Chix exploded into raw sound for the chorus.

  “How will I know when it’s time to go?

  When it’s time to go, yeah, it’s time to go!”

  The slam pit began with a few brave souls who started crashing into each other. Hanna stood transfixed, oblivious to everything and everyone save Sparrow. She was mesmerized, hypnotized, snow-blinded by Sparrow’s white, suburban fury. White light, white heat…

  “How will I know when my new life’s begun?

  How will I know when my song’s been sung?”

  Tom winced. The Chix played great tunes, but the lyrics were generally not up to the task. Lena tugged on Tom’s shirt.

  “She changed the words again,” Lena said.

  He leaned over to put his mouth up to her ear.

  “I think I liked it better the way it was before,” he said.

  His hot breath in her ear gave Lena goose bumps. She liked it. She looked up at him, watched as his tongue slipped out of his mouth and he licked his lips while watching Sparrow.

  God…

  Sparrow shook like a leaf on a tree in a hurricane as she sang.

  Love to have him lick me…

  Tom cocked his head to one side as if listening for one particular note somewhere within the thick soup of noise blasting out of the Chix’ speakers.

  “Did you say something?” he asked Lena.

  “What?”

  Love to kiss Sparrow…

  “I asked if you said something!”

  Lena shook her head.

  Want you inside me…

  Tom laughed, then scratched his head, looking around at the others people in Dave-O’s warehouse.

  “You sure you didn’t just say something?” he asked Lena.

  “What?”

  I love you, Sparrow…

  “Are you sure you didn’t just say something?!”

  I’m wet just looking at him…

  “Yes, I’m sure!”

  Sparrow stood still in front of the mike stand now, eyes still closed, blonde hair plastered to her face like a sweaty angel.

  “I thought I heard you say something, though,” Lena told Tom.

  Her legs wrapped around me…

  “Me? I didn’t say anything.”

  “What?”

  Hands grabbing my ass…

  “I said I didn’t say anything!”

  He does have a nice ass…

  Sparrow opened her eyes, and was now watching Lena and Tom. Still singing “Time to Go,” still putting everything she had into it, except her eyes.

  “I think I’m hearing things,” Tom told Lena, putting his mouth up to her ear again.

  Hot breath…

  Lena turned, put her mouth up to Tom’s ear. “Me too.”

  “What did you hear?” Tom asked her.

  Look at me! It was as if Sparrow’s voice rang in his head. He looked at her. Lena looked, too. Sparrow winked at them. She saw herself as if through their eyes. She watched herself wink at them, grin, all the while gyrating to the song, mouth pressed up to the mike as she sang, hair wet and matted from sweat… From a different angle she saw herself through yet another pair of eyes that focused on her ass and legs in her Catholic schoolgirl skirt, her mouth as it formed the words to the song…

  Beautiful as Jovah remembered…

  “That wasn’t me,” Tom told Lena.

  “What wasn’t?” Lena asked. They looked at Sparrow again.

  Not me, she shrugged.

  Want to join with her…

  Become one…

  My being with her being, my soul with her soul…

  They looked at the tall girl, Hanna. She didn’t notice them. She looked lost inside herself. Or lost inside Sparrow.

  But then I won’t exist anymore…

  Nicola went into a drum solo with tribal fury. The other Chix got a breather while Nicola pounded the skins. Sparrow wiped sweat from her eyes and sipped her beer.

  None of us will!

  Reading her mind?

  Lena…

  Sparrow…

  Hanna…

  Jovah…

  Tom?

  Thoughts blossomed in Tom’s head as if they were his own, but he knew they weren’t.

  Want me… does she… does he… want me?

  Problem was, some of them were his.

  Dev and Sin added guitar and bass to the drum solo for a dose of serious static interference, hair-raising white noise. Sparrow screamed like a rock-goddess Janis Joplin, and Tom saw himself through her eyes. He saw the slight bulge of his beer gut, his angular jaw, the stupefied expression on his face. Was that how he looked to Sparrow? Depressing. But was he really seeing himself through her eyes, or was he imagining it? How could he tell?

  He tapped Lena on the shoulder and directed a thought at her: Can you hear me, Lena?

  She nodded. I can hear you, Tom.

  Are we in each other’s mind?

  Yes, I think we are.

  She saw herself through Tom’s eyes, black on black on black, clutching a beer bottle to her breast, her curvaceous body, her pale face, the practiced blankness of her eyes.

  Maybe Galactic Bill was right.

  Maybe Galactic Bill lied. Maybe this is all in my head…

  He didn’t lie…

  The Chix ended their first song and went right into the next. Another drum solo, heavy hands pounding it out, crashing right into “Hanging Out,” the Gainesville punk anthem.
It was about what they did on the front porch of the Blue House, nothing else to do, nowhere else to go. Watching the cars go by. The song captured the dark magic of hanging out with friends, cold beer in the refrigerator, not a care in the world, wasting time, wasting life, going nowhere. It was an addiction as bad as being strung out on junk.

  It was a long song, droning on and on and on, repeating the same chords over and over and over. It seemed like it might never end, but of course it would eventually. Like Peter Pan, everyone would have to grow up sooner or later. Growing up could mean becoming lost, though. Lost boys and lost girls could become lost men and lost women if they left Never Land.

  Sparrow’s voice sounded like a lonely cry amid the drone of the song.

  “Hanging Out” ended unceremoniously as the guitar, bass, drums, and Sparrow’s voice just trailed off, winding down amid the squeal of feedback. Dying.

  “This next song is new,” Sparrow announced. “It’s called ‘Here for the Beer’.”

  Nicola started with a funk drum beat. Sparrow rapped the words so quickly they were indiscernible. The chorus was a blender stirring up the slam pit. Full-throttle with flannel shirts, leather jackets, mohawks, piercings, Doc Martens, ripped jeans, black lipstick, skull tattoos, dreadlocks… all were churned together in the pit, a frappe of rebel-without-a-clue angst. Punk was dead, but the Chix had revived the patient, turned it into a George Romero zombie moshing around the pit.

  Hanna covered her ears.

  Tom felt the excitement of the music lure him to the edge of the pit. He prepared to leap into the frenzied morass of bodies, but stopped when he saw something he’d never seen before; not in a mosh pit at any rate: Ballet. Swan Lake met The Decline and Fall of Western Civilization. The Nutcracker Suite as performed by the Sex Pistols. Chuck Speedy, Pinhead, Holly and Jodiee, Dave-O, and all of Gainesville’s decked-out punks leaped and kicked and spun gracefully around in the pit. Twyla Tharp and Mikhail Baryshnikov would have stood by in awe, or fallen into seizures, at the spectacle. It was all in Hollywood magic slow motion, while the Chix raged on.

  Tom smiled. This was why he did LSD, to see the unseeable. To live the weird.

  “It’s beautiful,” Lena said.

  But it was too much for Hanna, the wall of noise, the trippy vision, meeting Sparrow face to face. She was disoriented, needed fresh air. She took a step backwards, and tripped over the wires plugging Dev’s amp into the wall, and fell. She hit her head on the grease-stained concrete floor, and her eyes closed.

  The buzz of the dragon was deafening as it hovered over Hanna, mouth dripping hot oil as it opened to snap her up. The General cursed the winds, cursed the earth, cursed all creation as he opened fire on it with his .45. One glass eye of the mechanical beast shattered. A body fell out, the pilot, screaming all the way down. His burning body exploded into ashes when it hit the ground. The dragon fell sideways, veered away from Hanna, smashed into another dragon. Both exploded into twisted metal, fused together, and plummeted to earth. Some of Alice company died when the fused dragons crashed onto them. Hanna experienced their final moments as if they were her own, remembering loved ones, remembering promises made to wives, children, best friends not to die, and now promises being broken. At the end was always the Grey Nothing, the threshold to—

  “Bring it on!” the General screamed like a storm. “I’ll eat your fucking guts for breakfast! Bring it on!”

  “Oh yeah, it’s the last big rush,” legless Deuce said, with a beatific smile. He felt the seering pain of his wounds as ecstacy, a death-high.

  “This is a reality check,” Galactic Bill’s blackened corpse said. The battle, the dying, the screams, the laughter, the burning all seemed to make sense to him—Hanna felt it—all fit together like the pieces of a puzzle. It was a map to God. Everyone had their part. Even Hanna.

  Galactic Bill had an erection. Hanna knew it was because of her.

  “You were our wet dream,” he told her. “We all made love to you in our sleep. You sucked the life out of us, and we gave it freely. Take it. It’s all yours to do with as you will.”

  No, she wanted to say. She didn’t want it, any of it. But she knew it was true. They made love to her because the ones they loved were gone; rather they were the ones who were gone. They used Hanna just like they used their guns, they used toilet paper, they used the war.

  What war?

  Why was this a war?

  Where am I?

  Where the fuck are we?

  Hanna turned and there was Sparrow, and Tom and the other girl, Lena, stood on either side of her, clustered together nervously, surveying the carnage around them. Tourists in Hanna’s private Hell.

  Jovah’s dream, an inner voice corrected her.

  What the fuck is this?

  Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit…

  What is this, Vietnam or something?

  Or something, Hanna thought. Something ELSE, something beyond mere dreams and memories and imagination, beyond insanity. This is Jovah.

  YOU DON’T BELONG HERE came an overpowering thought directed at Tom and Lena.

  “I don’t belong here,” Sparrow said.

  No reply. The action had stopped, freeze-frame, and all eyes—dead, living, and polished glass—were watching the intruders.

  “This isn’t good,” Tom said.

  A heli-dragon shrieked in rage. The General bellowed white-hot anger.

  DIE!!

  DIE!!

  DIE!!

  Hanna opened her eyes. Silence.

  “Where am I?” she asked. She recognized the first face she saw. Dave-O, the one who’d hit on her in the parking lot.

  “You okay?” he asked. He helped her up. She had to push him away once she was on her own two feet again.

  “I’m fine.”

  The Chix on the stage were helping Sparrow up. Hanna knew without having to see that Lena and Tom were being helped up by friends as well. They’d all collapsed at the same time.

  “You on something?” Dave-O asked Hanna.

  “I was born on something,” she replied harshly.

  She approached the stage where Sparrow was now rubbing her eyes with her hands, shaking off what had felt like a punch in the face.

  “Are you okay?” Hanna asked her.

  Sparrow nodded.

  “Sorry about that,” Hanna added with a half grin.

  Sparrow frowned. “Wasn’t your fault.”

  “Maybe not,” Hanna conceded.

  Sparrow arched an eyebrow. The affectation made Hanna’s heart flutter. She resisted swooning. It took a visible effort.

  “Are you okay?” Sparrow asked.

  Hanna started to nod, thought better of it, and shook her head.

  “You want to take five?” Nicola asked Sparrow.

  “Yeah, thanks.” Sparrow led Hanna to where Tom and Lena were recovering.

  Tom took a swig of beer, offered some to Lena.

  “I didn’t like that at all,” he said as Lena downed some of his beer.

  “I need air,” Sparrow said. “Come on.”

  They went outside. Furtive glances from concerned and not so concerned friends were making Sparrow’s skin itch. Kin to rubberneckers on the highway, they made Sparrow feel like a victim trapped in the twisted metal of a car wreck.

  “Hanna,” Sparrow said.

  Hanna forced herself not to jump with romantic glee at hearing Sparrow say her name.

  “What?” She didn’t move closer to Sparrow, although she very much wanted to.

  “Are you on the same thing we’re on?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who are you?” Tom asked her. “You don’t look like someone who would normally go to a show like this.”

  “I’m a friend,” Hanna said. “A friend of Galactic Bill’s.”

  “That explains it,” Sparrow said.

  “It does?” Lena asked.

  Sparrow nodded.

  “How?” Tom asked.

  “I don’t
know,” Sparrow said. “But it does.”

  Chapter Six

  Emily lit a joint right after flipping over Lou Reed’s Greatest Hits on vinyl. “Satellite of Love” was one of her favorite songs to get high to, with the lights dimmed and Io sound asleep in the back bedroom. The front door was open to allow the cool evening breeze in, which was nice even with the air conditioner blasting. She was slightly bummed not to be at Dave-O’s tonight, watching Sparrow and the Chix play, hanging out with her friends, but she was totally into helping Io, so it was okay. There would always be other shows, other parties.

  She was kind of tired, anyway. Maybe she really was getting old. At thirty-four she was older than most of her friends. Emily couldn’t believe she was that old. Usually, she didn’t feel it at all. Now, though… She was happy to lounge around, listen to music, get slightly stoned, relax.

  It was funny. She still wore the same clothes she’d always worn. She lived the same life, more or less. Outwardly, she had to make a few concessions to society’s mores, especially now that she worked part-time as a paralegal for a law firm. She even had a navy-blue skirt suit for when she had to go to court. Inwardly, she despised the necessity of having to conform, even a little, but otherwise she was able to continue living the life she wanted to live.

  In Gainesville, the deadhead scene was all mixed up with the punk scene, and the Goth scene, and the reggae scene, and a dozen other “scenes.” Emily found it all highly amusing and enjoyable. The list of sub-cultures and sub-sub-cultures seemed endless. Half the time, she couldn’t figure out who was what or which was which. It didn’t matter, really. As long as people were cool with who she was, they could be born-again Southern Baptists for all she cared.

  Sweet-smelling marijuana smoke wafted through the living room. Emily leaned back, finally relaxing, feeling mellow. These were the moments she cherished. She was happy, satisfied, content. She knew people like Tom and Sparrow would leave Gainesville some day soon, like so many others before them. Every year someone left, but a few also stayed, like Emily. She had no intention of ever moving away from Gainesville, no desire to live anywhere else.

  She’d miss Tom and Sparrow most of all, their energy, their creativity. That same energy would take them away, of course. Sooner or later they’d need new experiences to breathe life into their fire. They could never be truly content in Gainesville… or, perhaps, the problem was that they could become too content in Gainesville. They both had the potential to soar, but they needed a past from which to launch. Gainesville would be that past, and Emily would be part of it, proud to have played a role in their lives.