Acid Rock

by Warren Murphy

  He mouthed the words against the glass.

  “Who wants to come in and talk with the old Banger?”

  He heard the usual shriek go up and leaned back to examine the reaction. Twenty-five girls. Twenty-five takers. Wait. Twenty-four.

  The one who wasn’t taking was a freckle-faced redhead with a sleek, lithe body and a face man, that was zonkier than zonked.

  She had to be high, because she looked bored, and young girls did not get bored in the presence of Big Bang Benton.

  Big Bang fixed her with his never-fail stare over the dark glasses, letting his eyes sing her songs of love and lechery waiting just around the corner.

  The girl yawned. She didn’t even bother to cover her mouth with her hand.

  That decided Big Bang. He waved to a young pimply-faced usher who stood behind the crowd of girls, and then pointed to the redhead. Without another word, he turned away, left his studio and headed down the hallway to his dressing room. A dressing room was totally useless for a disc jockey, who could work in his underwear. But Big Bang Benton, who had been hooked on show business since he was Bennet Rappelyea of Batavia, New York, fifteen years earlier, had insisted upon and gotten one in his new contract.

  Damn good thing too, he thought. Because if the station had balked about it, Big Bang was prepared to leave and take his following to any of the other dozen stations in the city that were falling all over themselves to sign him. When the Banger whistled, the station danced, and for the frustrated entertainer, there was a kind of sweet music in that too.

  Back inside the studio, the teeny boppers were making less than sweet music.

  “Who does he think he is, walking away like that?” one demanded.

  “But he smiled at us. Maybe he’ll be back,” said her companion.

  The usher approached the redhead.

  “Big Bang wants to see you,” he said, touching the girl’s arm.

  She turned and looked deep into his pimples, her eyes not quite focused.

  “Does he really know Maggot?” she asked, her voice mushy thick, as if her tongue tip were stuck to the back of her lower teeth.

  “The Banger knows everybody, honey. They’re all his friends,” the usher said.

  “Good,” said Vickie Stoner. “Gotta ball that Maggot.”

  The usher leaned forward and whispered in her ear. “First you gotta ball the Banger.”

  “’S’ all right. Him first. Gotta ball that Maggot.”

  By now, the other girls had realized that Vickie was Big Bang’s chosen girl of the day and they crowded toward her, wondering if she were some famous groupie that they had not recognized. But her face was unfamiliar to them and after a few seconds’ inspection, they decided that she was not their equal, that Big Bang Benton’s taste was all in his ass, and they turned away. The usher took Vickie by the hand and headed toward a door in the corner of the room. At the door, he turned and called to the girls who were motionless, in that brief frozen moment before the stampede to the exits started, “Hang around, girls. I’ll be back in a few minutes to tell you some inside stories about Big Bang and your other favorite stars.” He smiled, cracking open a white-headed pimple on the side of his mouth, but the girls ignored that and squealed. Even an usher at an acid rock station was a celebrity.

  The usher pushed Vickie through the door and began walking her down a long, rug-deadened hall, festooned with the station’s initials. W-A-I-L. “Wail with Big Bang.” “It’s Big Banging Time at WAIL.” In a series of framed advertisements behind glass on the walls idiotic slogans reduced Marconi’s act of genius to its lowest common denominator. The advertisements were obvious allusions to sex, all happily seized upon by youngsters who wanted to embarrass their parents, without the concomitant danger of being responsible for the slogans themselves.

  Vickie Stoner allowed herself to be propelled along the hallway, oblivious to the carpet, the signs and even the touch of the usher who was finding it difficult to resist a cheap feel, but did because of the possibility of reprisal from Big Bang.

  “This is it, honey,” the usher said, pausing in front of a wooden door with a gold star on it. “The Banger’s inside.”

  “Gotta ball that Maggot,” Vickie Stoner said.

  She opened the door and walked inside. The dressing room was actually a small studio apartment, complete with refrigerator, stove, dining nook and bed. Big Bang Benton was in the bed, a sheet pulled up to his chin, staring at Vickie over his almost-black glasses.

  “Lock the door, sweetie,” he said.

  Vickie Stoner turned and fumbled with the lock button but did not know, or care, whether or not it locked,

  “You’re a loyal fan of the Old Banger, eh?” Benton asked.

  “Do you know Maggot?” she asked.

  “Maggot? One of my dearest and nearest friends. A great talent. Truly a star in the firmament of the music world. Why, just the other day, he said to me, he said…”

  “Where is he?” Vickie interrupted.

  “He’s in town,” Benton said. “But why worry about him. We’re talking about you and me, the Old Banger.”

  “Gotta ball that Maggot,” Vickie said.

  “The way to his bed is through mine,” said Benton.

  Vickie nodded and began removing her clothes. In almost no time, she was stripped and crawling under the cover where she flopped down on top of Benton’s porcine bloated stomach.

  After it was all over, Big Bang decided it would be helpful to the girl to get to know her a little better. Perhaps show a little interest in her and let her know the big stars were just folks after all. So he talked to her about his hopes and his needs, his frustrations and his sense of accomplishment at bringing a little happiness into the lives of young America through good clean entertainment.

  Before he could discover that Vickie was snoring, the telephone next to the bed rang.

  He hesitated before reaching out to the telephone. But he was relieved to find out it was not his bookmaker, but the station’s publicity department. He was supposed to meet Maggot later today at Maggot’s hotel suite to present him with a gold record for the million-sales of Maggot’s latest and greatest hit, Mugga-Mugga Blink Blank.

  “Maggot say yes?” Big Bang asked.

  “It’s all set with him,” the publicity man said.

  “Gotta ball that Maggot,” Vickie mumbled in her sleep, after hearing the magic name.

  “All right,” Benton said. “When and where?” He repeated the answer. “Hotel Carlton. Five-thirty. Got it.”

  He hung up the phone and was reaching for Vickie when the phone rang again.

  There was no doubt about who was calling this time. Big Bang let out a heavy sigh, picked up the phone and sat up straight in bed to listen, lest his disrespectful slouching somehow show over the telephone.

  “Yeah, Frankie, yeah. I understand.” He tried a chuckle on for size, to lighten the tension. He felt Vickie Stoner stir and reached out a hand for her, but she eluded it, got out of bed, and began to dress. He waved to her not to go as he listened to Frankie. He winked at Vickie. “Frankie, you call at the damnedest times. I’m in the rack now with this sweet little red-headed groupie named Vickie and…I don’t know. Wait a minute, I’ll ask. Hey, Vickie. What’s your last name?”

  “Stoner.”

  “I know you’re stoned. What’s your last name?”

  “Gotta ball that Maggot,” Vickie said and opened the door.

  As the door closed behind her, Benton said, “I don’t know. All she said was she was stoned.” Pause. “I don’t know. Maybe she said Stoner.”

  Then Big Bang listened, listened to what he had just had in his dressing room, listened to what she was worth, listened intently to how some information on Vickie Stoner could not only wipe out his gambling debts but set him up for life, listened intently enough so that when he hung up, he raced naked out into the hall, looking both ways, but there was no sign of Vickie. Only a troop of visiting Girl Scouts from Kearny, New Jersey, all o
f whom seemed delighted at seeing Big Bang naked, but whose scout leader thought the display was obscene and marched off to complain to the station management.

  Vickie was out on the street by that time. Something in her mind told her that Maggot was at the Hotel Carlton but she didn’t know how she knew. Must have been an extra-good pill. The secret of all knowledge. Better living through chemistry.

  Wobbly but decisive, she headed downtown, where she knew the Carlton was located.

  Back at the studio, Big Bang reentered his dressing room and picked up the telephone. He gave the switchboard operator a number to dial and when it rang and was answered, he said: “This is the Banger. Let me talk to Maggot.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CALVIN CADWALLADER PUT THE TELEPHONE DOWN with a feeling of annoyance pervading his being, yeah, his inner being, right down to his innermost soul. That made him feel delighted. He promised himself that he would describe in great, glowing detail to his shrink the anger and annoyance he had felt, the curious theory being that after being annoyed, if one talked it out, the annoyance could be found not really to have existed.

  But for now, there was annoyance. “If you see a red-haired groupie named Vickie Stoner, pick her up. It’s important.”

  Things like that might be important to Big Bang Benton but Calvin Cadwallader knew better.

  He touched his fingers to the sleeves of his brocade dressing gown, then ran his fingers lovingly through his freshly-curled blond hair, wiped them again on his sleeves and returned to the dining room of his eight room suite. The Wall Street Journal was open to the stock prices and Calvin Cadwallader, before he was interrupted, had been checking to see how he was doing.

  He was doing very well indeed. That was one aspect in favor of being Maggot. But on the other hand, there were the headaches and the pressures and the feeling of lost identity. That was also because of being Maggot.

  The psychiatrist had told him this was normal with someone who was leading two lives, and Calvin Cadwallader believed him because he was the only person in the whole world who loved Calvin Cadwallader for himself, and not just because seven nights a week and some days, Calvin Cadwallader donned terrible clothes and hideous makeup and festooned himself like a butcher shop to appear in public as Maggot, the leader of the Dead Meat Lice.

  Maggot put on his white cotton gloves and then began again to run his finger down the columns of stock closing prices. Every so often, he would jot a number down on a light green ledger pad next to him, and then go into a flurry of high-speed calculations, the subject which he had been trained to excel in when he had gone to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. That was also where he had first picked up a guitar and forced himself to learn to play it, hoping it would help him overcome the crushing shyness which had been his ever since he had first realized that his globe-trotting parents hated him and wished him dead.

  Maggot and the Dead Meat Lice started as a joke, a parody, a one-song routine in an RPI variety show. But someone in the audience knew someone who knew someone else and before you could say “shattered eardrum,” Maggot and the Dead Meat Lice had signed a recording contract.

  Fame, fortune and schizophrenia followed. Now Calvin Cadwallader considered both Calvin Cadwallader and Maggot as two separate and distinct persons. He vastly preferred Calvin Cadwallader. Still at times, Maggot was nice to have around because his music had made him very wealthy and he didn’t care what Calvin Cadwallader did with the money.

  Cadwallader had invested it wisely and well, specializing in oil and mineral stocks, but specifically excluding the string of companies owned wholly or in part by his father. He hoped they all went under, and even though it would have cost him hundreds of thousands, he wrote frequent letters to Congress, urging the elimination of the oil-depletion allowance on which his father’s fortune had been built.

  Morning computations done, Maggot rose from the table and went to a small bar-type refrigerator in a corner of the room. He extracted six bottles of pills, opened them, and began to count them out on a clean saucer he took from a closet. Six vitamin Es, eight Cs, two multivitamins, four capsules of B-12, an assortment of tablets of wheat germ and rose hips, and high protein pills.

  He capped the bottles tightly and replaced them in the refrigerator. Then he peeled off his gloves, so he wouldn’t get lint on any of the tablets and began to pop them down, one after another, without water, the ultimate mark of skill for a pill popper.

  He was five-feet-eleven, weighed 155, and he credited his pills with giving him a resting pulse rate of fifty-eight. He neither smoked nor drank; he had never used a drug; and he went to the Episcopal Church every Sunday, a feat made simpler by the fact that without his Maggot makeup and fright wig, and without lamb chops hanging from his chest, no one was likely to recognize this tall thin WASP as the singer that Time magazine had labeled “a cesspool of decadence.”

  Maggot walked toward the front of the suite, where the three Dead Meat Lice shared rooms and were probably playing cards, when the door bell rang once, timidly.

  He looked around for a servant, saw none, and because he could not stand ringing doorbells or telephones, he picked up his white gloves, put them back on and opened the door.

  A lissome, red-haired girl stood there. She looked at him dreamily and spoke softly.

  “You’re Maggot, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, but don’t touch,” said Cadwallader, who believed in the truth above all.

  “I don’t want to touch,” said Vickie Stoner. “Let’s ball,” she said, and fell, slumping onto the floor. Cadwallader who barely had a chance to recoil and get out of her way lest her falling body touch him, began to shout for the Lice to come and take care of her.

  “Help. Strange woman. Help. Come quick.” Maggot yelled the same words again, then turned and ran to the refrigerator to get calcium tablets, which he had been assured would be good for his nerves.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE LAND ROVER HAD been driven through the night, all the gas in the spare ten-gallon drum in the back had been used, and now when the vehicle crested a hill and the morning sun knifed into the eyes of the driver, he realized how tired he was.

  Gunner Nilsson pulled off to the side of the narrow, rock-strewn dirt road. He hopped from the open rover and went to a nearby tree, where, using a handkerchief, he wiped morning dew from its low hanging leaves, and carefully washed his face and eyes. The cool feeling lasted only a few seconds before the handkerchief turned damp and hot and sweaty, but Nilsson redoused it and washed his face again and then felt better.

  It had taken a while for Lhasa to interest him in the project, but now Gunner Nilsson was fully committed to carrying out the million-dollar contract on the girl. A million dollars. It could build him a real hospital. It could buy him real medical supplies and surgical equipment, instead of the leftovers he now used. The million dollars could put meaning into his life and he was at the age when meaning was all that was left to his life. He and Lhasa were the last of the Nilssons. There would be no more. No one to carry on the family name, or its sour tradition, but what better way for it to end than in a final act of assassination that would be a tribute to life, to humanity, to healing?

  The end justified the means, at least in this case, just as the end had justified the means twelve years before, when he had operated on Lhasa for appendicitis and while the younger brother was out, had performed on him a vasectomy that would guarantee the extinction of the Nilsson killers.

  As eldest, Gunner had been the keeper of the tradition, and he had determined that the tradition was not worth keeping. Except for this one contract. For all the good it could do.

  Gunner Nilsson clambered back into the rover, no longer afraid of falling asleep at the wheel, and drove the steep three miles down the mountainside to the small waterfront village which had most of the necessities of life, including a telephone in the home of a British field officer.

  Lhasa was to have telephoned a message to the field officer whic
h should have arrived by now. It made a difference—being a millionaire medical missionary, or a penniless overeducated crank trying to bring healing to natives who were not ready for healing that did not involve the mask and the dance and the song.

  Field Lieutenant Pepperidge Barnes was at home when Dr. Gunner Nilsson arrived; he was openly delighted to see the old man. He often worried about the kindly, harmless gentleman alone up there in the hills with those insane savages, and he had been meaning to drive up to see him. No, there had been no message for Doctor Nilsson. Was it anything important? Oh, just a message from his brother on vacation? Well, of course, feel free to use the telephone. Lt. Barnes was going to walk to his office to see what mischief the retarded inhabitants of this retarded land had committed on Her Majesty during the night. Perhaps when Dr. Nilsson had completed his call and had rested, he would stop at Lt. Barnes’ office and the two could play a game of chess?

  After Barnes left, Gunner Nilsson sat for a long time, looking at the telephone, half-expecting it to ring. He did not consider it possible that Lhasa had failed. After all, he was a Nilsson with Nilsson instincts and Gunner had told him how to do it, and Nilssons did not fail. Still, he should have called by now.

  Gunner waited, but after an hour elapsed he began the laborious process of placing a call to the number Lhasa had told him about in Switzerland.

  He sat for another hour with the telephone in his hand, staring at his hand, taking satisfaction in the knowledge that it was old and tanned and had of its own volition put down the weapons which for six hundred years had been the legacy of the Nilsson family, father to son, generation to generation, century to century.