Scott leans into Michele, close enough for her to pull back slightly. “What’s with those?” he asks.
“Aqua Velvas,” she says.
“They glow,” he says.
“Glow sticks,” she says as if she were talking to someone who’s a bit slow, nodding toward someone lifting a glowing plastic tube from his cocktail.
“Thanks,” he says curtly and leaves for the bar.
You’re tough, girl.
She catches me watching. Her eyes linger a moment. Then, without any specific expression, she turns and joins the others at the end of the bar.
I click my tongue. What is your deal, girl?
Scott shoves a glowing glass of liquid and ice in front of my face. “Aqua Velva.”
“What’s that?”
“Cocktail.” He drinks. “Strong one. Lots of tequila. And a glow stick.” He swishes the ice around in his glass with the glowing plastic rod.
Then, from the back of the bar, the tattoo of a drum emerges. It curls around me and turns my head as a thick, throbbing rhythm bellows across the room.
I take off toward the doorway, whence the Revolting Cocks’ “Attack Ships on Fire” calls. A voice cries out above the pummeling beat. Barely human—like that of a man trapped inside a machine—it cries out, “Time and time and time again,” that it’s freezing and hurting, having another bad dream. I feel the beat, lashing like a whip—a drum machine hammering out 150 beats a minute—while other, nameless machines, pummeling unknown parts, stamp out a steady, implacable time, like infinite marching. The inhuman voice pleads, “Someone, somewhere wake me up.”
This voice and these machine sounds crawl through the relentless beat of the drum, the simple, brutal hammering filling the room. My body follows this battering signature across the dance floor. I lose myself to it. My head rolls the way the machines roll; my legs and arms thrash the way the machines keep the beat. The sound compresses me, winding me like a gigantic spring being tightened in some obscure factory, tighter and tighter and tighter, and the only way I can keep from flying into pieces is to expel this energy through my lashing head, my flaying hair, the jerking of my arms, and the spin of my body this way, then that way, until my eyes sting from the sweat, which tastes salty, like sex—like ecstasy.
Nothing exists but my body and the unremitting, remorseless sounds of machines. I’m untouchable.
This is what I play for: to get everyone to feel like I do right now. Infinite. Muscular. Only the body, the beat, the hammering rhythm, the machines, the voice exist; I am untouchable and beyond any care. It’s like those first hours with Amy when we make up, thrashing in bed, devouring every particle of each other again.
Then, as always, the song ends, and the next one shifts too much, shattering the spell.
Strands of hair stick to my face. I feel the sweat dribbling down my nose and my cheeks, and off my chin. Patches of my shirt cling to my skin.
Turning back to the doorway, I notice a few people checking me out. I walk through their stares like cobwebs. Damn right, folks. That’s what I can do for you if you listen—if you hear what I create. You will. Soon. A few more weeks, and then you’ll hear. Believe me.
Stepping up to our table, I pull off the hair sticking to my face.
“There,” Tanya says, pointing to my Aqua Velva, the ice mostly melted, the glow stick faded to a faint green smudge. “Saved it for you.”
I take a long suck from it, and it feels good. The cocktail, this place, my life. All good right now. I’ve songs to write, to play and sing. This is why I’m here, goddamn it. That’s why, Amy. No matter how hard saying good-bye to you is going to be.
Chapter 7
Electronic Body Music
—Scott—
Getting out of Chicago the next morning is easy. It’s Sunday, and traffic’s light. It’s overcast, so not bright—fortunately for Jonathan. He took aspirin and pushed back a couple of glasses of water before we left Tanya’s. He still looks rough.
Once we cross the Skyway and are on the expressway in Indiana, Jonathan leans the seat back as far as it goes. He turns away from the windows.
“Here,” I say, handing him a T-shirt from the backseat. “Put this over your eyes.”
Jonathan lays it across half of his face. After about ten minutes, his mouth starts moving as if he’s talking something out to himself. He puckers his lips and bunches them off to the side. Then he starts pointing to things he’s showing himself in his head. Next he’ll make a suggestion. I never know what to expect.
“You know,” Jonathan says, “we should change our name.”
“Okay …”
“And our sound,” he says, adjusting the T-shirt. “We have to.”
“Uh-huh.”
“This isn’t Ohio. Chicago isn’t. We don’t have to be us. I mean, who we were. We shouldn’t be them. They’ve never made it there, so they can’t make it here.”
“All right.” I’m the one who told him all this.
“We can’t be who we were. Unless we want to fail.”
“Okay.” Saying anything more would mess with whatever’s going on in his head.
“White Heat. We were trying too hard to be someone else. One of those post-punk bands—Joy Division. But”—Jonathan stares down into the footwell and pushes around a balled-up sandwich wrapper as if about to make a dark confession—“I keep listening to all this new stuff. Music made to move to. Less guitar, more machine driven. Keyboards. Loops. Using found sounds, like drills or stamping machines. A razor blade tapping out a beat on a mirror. It’s music for your body to move to. Electronic body music. It sounds a lot less like a couple of punks trying to live out a rock ’n’ roll fantasy and more like … music for the rhythm zone. Clubs. Music to get sweaty to. Get erotic with.”
I’ve no idea where he’s going with this. I peg my eyes to the road and listen. Jonathan can lose his way rather badly in life, but his instincts about music are usually spot on.
“I know I’m talking dance music. It’s not AOR material. We’ll never get airplay on QFM96, ‘Ohio’s Best Rock.’” He says the tagline for WLVQ with the same dramatic voice as the announcer’s. “College radio—could be. Clubs—definitely. And, I’m not talking East Dallas or some other danceteria crap. I’m talking the New York underground scene. London. Chicago. Belgium. Bands like Cabaret Voltaire. Front 242. A Split Second. Revolting Cocks.”
“RevCo?” I ask.
“Their songs are cries from the pit of the machine. Someone screaming to wake us up, make us see we live in a world with a madman in the Oval Office—Ronnie Ray-Gun. ‘In the East, where the bear is dancing/in the West where the Eagle flies.’ Asking us how’re we going to survive. About DuPont killing people in Bhopal and West Virginia: ‘dead bodies everywhere’ and ‘the official number of the dead is now put at 38.’”
“Front 242 I can see. A Split Second—sure. But RevCo? Next you’ll being saying we should do hardcore like the Dead Kennedys.”
“Okay, not RevCo. You get the idea though, right?”
“I think so. But …”
“But what?” Jonathan asks.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
“That I don’t know.”
“This isn’t a stupid idea,” Jonathan says.
“No. It’s probably very smart,” I say.
“Or psychotic.”
“Didn’t say it was.”
“But what?”
“But you don’t really write like that.” Now that I hear it, I don’t believe it.
“Not yet.”
“What would happen to those—what do you call them—not-ended stories?” I ask.
“Unfinished stories.”
“Unfinished stories. You keep talking about all those songs you can’t finish because you don’t know how the storie
s will end. Yet when you do finish them, that’s what people like the most.”
Jonathan frowns. “That’s the whole point. It’s gotten us all the way to—nowhere.”
“We’re moving to Chicago.”
“Exactly,” Jonathan says. “And what did you say about that? ‘What was must be left.’ Leave the members of the old band—Sean and Marsha. Leave the name too. The sound. Everything. What will be must be new—as new as possible. You can’t walk away from yourself without realizing first who you actually are.”
“True.”
“Or what you change is only lipstick and haircuts. You’ll end up the same as ever.”
I wonder if that means giving up Amy as well. She has gotten into Jonathan’s head like a disease.
“All we’ve done in Columbus is run on the fumes of what was left after punk. They’ve taken us nowhere.”
Jonathan slaps his hand on the dashboard.
“But we want to be there.” He points beyond the fields of corn to the horizon far in the distance. “This isn’t 1980. I’m not Ian Curtis. Yeah, I sound like him. But I never wanted to be him. He hanged himself, for fuck’s sake. Who wants that?” He points at the horizon again. “You know I’m right.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Been hearing about this guy Trent Reznor. Think he’s calling his band Nine Inch Nails. Doesn’t matter. Nobody gets the sound he wants to create, right. So he goes off like Prince. Plays all his own instruments. He’s making a single with a goddamned Apple Plus—‘Down in It.’ Supposed to come out in September. I’ve heard it’s wicked. This is in Cleveland. Not New York. We’ll be in Chicago. Terminal White’s town.”
“So you’ll—”
“Whatever instrument—computer, machine, sequencer—name it; I’ll learn it. Or we’ll get somebody.”
“AnnMarie plays a drum machine, and—”
“Electronic drums, and she knows how to work delays better than I do,” he says and then gets quiet again.
I wish I knew what goes on in his head when he gets quiet like this.
“I don’t want to play between shifts,” Jonathan says. “I want playing to be my shifts. How I make my living. To be what I do. All the time. I don’t give a rat’s ass about art. Purity, selling out—those are just excuses masquerading as virtue for people who can’t make it. I’m done with ramen noodles.”
Jonathan sinks back into his seat. He’s staring off someplace.
“So then,” I say, “what do we need?”
“For?”
“This electronic body music sound.”
Until we get home five hours later, we talk about what he’s thinking of doing and exactly what we have to do to pull this off. I have to admit that what he’s saying sounds damned good. It’ll take a lot of work. But we’ll be a step up over Columbus. He is the creative one. Like Sammy was.
After dropping the last bag on the living room floor in Columbus, I pop the cap off a beer. It’s cold and hits the spot, but I’m already thinking about how much we need to get done. We have to get into that loft before anything changes Tanya’s mind—get our crap there. Shift our sound to this electronic body music—
“When are we telling Marsha and Sean?” Jonathan asks, standing in the doorway. “You know. The other band members.”
“Soon to be former members,” I say. “After that last show we have booked.”
He nods gravely.
“Now. Amy. Not until we’re gone.”
“Probably not.”
“Definitely not.”
“But—”
“But what?”
“It’s getting to me,” he says. “Especially now. With the loft. Having to lie to them. To Amy. I write music, play music to reveal truth. Yet, all I’m doing is lying. I’m a hypocrite. I hate people like me. Self-serving. Selfish.”
“Guy, don’t bullshit yourself,” I say. “You are being self-serving. And selfish. You’re leaving them behind. To go do what you say is what you need to do.”
“Oh, right. Thanks. That makes everything all better.”
“You know we have to get out of here. How many times do we have to talk about it? Chicago. Big market. Cabaret Metro. But now that you’re going, it’s all poor me. It’s so hard to do.”
He jams a cigarette into an ashtray so hard it flips off the edge of the sofa. “I hate this.”
“I don’t hate them, Jonathan,” I say. “Try to understand. There are winners, and there are losers. Losers feel so bad about moving on they don’t. They let opportunities pass by. They cry on the shoulders of all their loser friends. Now, moving on. With me. That takes stones. That makes you a winner.”
He purses his lips. I want to reach out, comfort him.
“Amy won’t move,” I say. “She’s already won her game. She’s got what she wants. Now she doesn’t want you to leave. That simple.” I nod my head.
He nods.
“The other two don’t have what it takes. But you do. So do I. We both do. You’re the one who gets out and makes it. With me. In Chicago. Brand-new start.”
“Yeah.”
“Calm down there, Jonathan. No need to be soooooo excited.”
He shrugs. “It’s hard.”
I know. I’ve done it before. And not everyone makes it.
Chapter 8
Persistence and Determination
—Scott—
The next morning, the sun oozes through the window above the kitchen sink. Steam rises from a press pot. I watch Jonathan pick up a spoon and stir the black slush. Then he puts the top on and pushes the plunger down.
“Coffee,” he says. “Very black.”
Fresh from a shower, he’s got a gray towel wrapped around his slender waist. His hair looks like blond paint spilled on his head, neck, and shoulders.
“Ahhh,” he says. He pours coffee into a cup. “The elixir of life.” He picks up another cup from the drying rack. “Want some?”
“Sure,” I say.
He pours another cup and sets it down in front of me.
“You’d make a good housewife,” I say.
“Nah. I’m a pig. Can’t even keep my room clean,” he says, sniffing his coffee. “So, what’s the plan today?”
“Not going to Logan this afternoon,” I say. “I’ll call my mom instead. Don’t care to hear what anyone there thinks about Chicago.”
“He never liked me much.”
“Said you were a fag. Long hair, you know. Man does he hate gays. Said he’d kill me if he thought I was queer.”
“Hillbilly,” he says.
“No,” I say. “Trailer trash. Get it right.”
I’d left my parent’s trailer at seventeen, as soon as I could after Sammy died. I’ve gone back only once. When my dad had a heart attack and only because my mother asked me to help with his funeral. She’d been on my side. When it mattered. I owed it to her. Once my mother’s gone, there’ll be nothing that can bring me to Logan or near Appalachia. It’s not my home. Not since I’ve had the choice. It’s loaded with trailer trash memories. Both shabby and hard. The stink of living in a double-wide jacked up on cinderblocks: old plastic, mildew, rust, dirt, propane, and septic tanks.
To be fair, my dad didn’t drink much. Didn’t hit anyone. Not me or my mom at least. He made enough money as a part-time mechanic that we didn’t have the usual trailer trash problems. No. The problem was he saw things one way: his. Everything was good or bad, right or wrong. Nothing in between. He saw my mother as a nag and me as a failure to be a man. A boy who wouldn’t do what he wanted to do with our neighbor’s daughters, the chubby, butt-ugly things that ran around the park, wiping their noses on their sleeves. He wanted to deflower them all. I’m sure his heart attack was caused by one of them bending too far over. Probably in Daisy Dukes. A thirteen- or fourteen-year-old.
Mostly though,
he hated Sammy. My only actual friend, the only person I ever wanted to spend time with.
Then Sammy died.
I bite my lip.
The doorbell rings.
This early, it could only be Amy. I’m not really awake yet.
Jonathan takes a slug of coffee and then saunters down the hall, the towel wrapped around his waist like a skirt.
The front door groans open.
“Ah,” Amy says, “so there you are.”
I hear nothing after that, meaning they’re kissing. It stays quiet, and I hope they’re not going to go at it in the hallway again. Finally I hear the sounds of walking in the hall. As Amy steps into the kitchen, she flashes a plastic smile at me.
“Hi,” she says mechanically.
I raise my cup. Can’t wait till you find out Jonathan’s leaving you to come with me to Chicago. Nothing you can do about it. I’m watching that scene play out in my mind: I tell her that straight out and then coldly sip my coffee. She says something proud and then rushes at me, screaming. We have a catfight. Her ex tries to pull us apart. His towel falls off, and—
Fun to think about, but better on Dallas or Falcon Crest.
“So,” I say. “What’s the plan?”
“You said no Logan. Rehearsal isn’t until late.”
“A few hours to relax then,” I say, pushing myself up from the chair. “I’ll leave you two alone.”
“Hold on,” Amy says. “I came here to see you too.”
“Oh?” I ask.
“What’s going on?” she asks.
“Going on? Nothing,” I say.
“Basically,” Jonathan says, “we’re going to rehearse. We have that gig coming up. Remember?”
“No,” Amy says. “I mean, what’s going on with you two?”
“Oh, sorry. You mean that we got engaged?” he asks, making an exaggeratedly shocked face.
“Don’t be an asshole,” Amy says. “Seriously.”
“Seriously what?”
“Seriously, what are you two up to? You disappear to Chicago. Your rehearsal schedule gets all funky. One gig? You’ve been playing out two, three times a month lately.”
Jonathan hesitates.
A Perfect Blindness Page 6