by AnonYMous
“Like Croatia? Where is that even?”
“Europe, and no. I mean, not right now. I was thinking maybe we sell everything and get out of here. We move west of here or east of here or wherever, and check in here once in a while, but you get a little air, a little distance.”
That was . . . a good plan, actually.
“Hmm.”
“Like you marry me.”
“Marry you?” I did actually shout that. I’d never been good at inside voices. “That’s the furthest thing from my mind.”
But the instant he’d said it, I could see it, I could see it all: Brad in a suit—not a tux, but something nice—with a corsage, and me in a simple white dress and a pretty courthouse, one far away where I didn’t have bad memories. And Brad’s parents with a camera and their I told you so looks and afterward, finally going back to his bed.
I wanted it. For weeks, I’d thought in hours and days, and even before that, I hadn’t been making plans because they’d all been set in stone. Now I could see years and decades again, fluid except for one thing: him. I could see the future, and plans with him didn’t scare me. I rubbed at my eyes.
“Just think about it,” he said, all calmness, all patience.
“Okay, I will. But I’m not going to think here in Fallow.”
“Where are you going then?”
“Well, I just bought some groceries, so I have to use them. And I have to stay in the state, so some of these places—” I gestured at his little stack of dreams “—are out, but I was thinking Glacier maybe.”
“Wren Masters, are you asking me out on a date?”
“I was hoping to just use you for your body.”
He stalked across the small office, caught me around the waist, and for the first time in weeks, kissed me. He felt right. He felt strong. He felt old and new at once. And he was mine.
He broke off and asked, “And after you use me for my body, many, many times, what’s next?”
“Whatever you want. We’re free.”
And we were.
CHARIOT OF DESIRE
CJ Crespo, drummer for the once wildly popular rock band Donjon, has always had a thing for frontman Donny Times. They spent the seventies getting high together, making music together, self-destructing together. But her qualms about ruining a creative partnership with sex kept them from ever hooking up. Now, Donny’s conversion to a bizarre fringe religion that won’t allow him to engage in—or even sing about—sex, drugs, or other “sins” threatens to tear Donjon apart.
As the band struggles to embrace a new decade and a new Donny, CJ must decide where she belongs: by Donny’s side, even if he can’t ever love her? Or out there making her own music, away from a man who gives and takes in equal measures?
For my mom.
Chapter 1
August 17th, 1983
Donny Times threw up before he went onstage, spattering the lighting technician’s new Converse. There was only one way to handle this sort of lapse in indestructibility with grace. He grinned at the techie and said, “Twelve thousand people would kill to be in your shoes right now.” The grin did little to staunch the sudden flow of misery, his sense of being something small and ugly. It was as though the scrambled eggs and Captain Morgan in his stomach were all that had been keeping him inflated tonight, and now he shriveled like a burnt tick. He gagged again, but nothing else came up. He put out an arm to ward off assistance, if assistance was forthcoming. His eyes clouded and he staggered forward, muttering, “Not tonight. I’m not going out there tonight. I’m not.”
CJ Crespo caught him by the arm and pulled him aside. Put her forehead to Donny’s and said, “Pull it together, shithead.” Her short blonde hair fell over her eyes—a little greasy looking, the way she liked it. She smelled like chicken wings and cigarettes. Her grip on his arm was rough, fingertips digging into his biceps with a rhythm that reminded him of a creature throbbing inside an egg, pressing against membrane and shell until that first delirious split. Everything CJ did had a pulse, felt like something ancient being born. His hand fumbled to find her arm, to return the odd embrace, but CJ pushed him away. Shook her hair from her eyes and rounded her broad shoulders. Almost grinned. “Get your ass out there.”
It was the first time CJ had spoken to him in a week, and he couldn’t help himself—he suddenly felt titanic. He ran a finger under the chain around his neck, and clasped his vessel in a loose fist. He grinned at the Missouri State Fairgoers as he jogged on stage, sliding his tongue across sour teeth, lifting a hand to the cheering crowd. 12,450 people; the grandstand seated 13,000. Almost a sellout. Who gave a shit if it was a state fair? Donny loved pigs and fried food. And who cared if Donjon had once packed stadiums? These 12,450 people worshiped Donny Times—his vomit, his sweat, his leather pants, his three and three-quarters octave range. Loved him for being part of something larger than himself—part of a creative process that mostly involved sitting in Dud Smats-Hinkle’s bathtub shirtless and feeling the Hand at work in his own small but splendid brain. Eating Jell-o swirl pudding and ambling up and down his registers while Harbor Ruse scratched his Kramer Beretta like a beloved dog, and CJ took her drumsticks to the side of the sink and Mark Gersh . . . was Mark.
They opened with “Wasted Space.” Fog machine, pink and blue swing-spots, and a strobe that turned the crowd into a swarm of panicked insects. Mark’s bass lines shot beneath the spectators, under the cement founds of the grandstand, out across the grass to the winking lights of the city. Donny was thrilled to find that he was here. Body, mind, and spirit. He was connected to all of these little jumping-jack men and women, whose slick torsos flashed blue and pink and gold, whose trembling manes flung droplets into the air. They were his, and he was theirs, and there was no greater feeling in the universe. He delivered the final three notes as a howling coloratura, fueled by a swell of premature applause that broke over him like a tremendous wave.
When the roar had died down, he stood there, sweat dripping from his body onto the stage. He was a small man standing on a big platform, serving his Creator the best way he knew how, filling the universe with all he had to give: his body—lean, hard as a board, black curls on his chest, knots of muscle on his skinny arms. His voice, a huge, whirling spirit that lunged from his throat, stretching sinewy arms like a genie freed from a lamp. Sweat trickled, itchy, between his fingers. His shoulders moved up and down, the ends of his long hair brushing his bare skin, and his breath prickled the mic, which he had a sudden urge to shove aside. He didn’t need it.
In this moment, he was everything.
He tore his gaze from the plane of faces and met CJ Crespo’s eyes. CJ had never looked better, Donny thought, than she did this very moment, wearing her raccoon mask of eyeliner and exhaustion. Her sleeveless black shirt said LET IT IN across her famously pointy tits. The golden brown skin below her collarbones had a block of fuschia on it from a follow spot. Donny took a long swig from his water bottle.
“Hello, Sedalia!” he shouted at the grandstand. “How you all doin’ tonight?”
The response was deafening. He turned back just a bit, setting the water bottle on a stool.
CJ gave him a nod. She didn’t hate him. She had gotten him out here. She had seen him falling and had pulled him back up. The way she did every time. He tasted bile and rum at the back of his throat, and he was ashamed.
Later, he would ask forgiveness. From the Creator, and from CJ.
For now, they had a show to do.
CJ looked away. Those broad, rounded shoulders hunched a little more.
Chapter 2
August 14th, 1983
Three days earlier
CJ was always positioned behind the guys for interviews. So it was strange to be alone in a blue suede armchair on the set of Studio 18—all concrete and stale air, with rose-colored velvet curtains gathered and twisted in thick ropes across the windows. Whether it was a photo or a taped interview, Donny was always in front. Usually Harbor beside him. CJ and Mark in the ba
ck, Mark quivering like some bulgy-eyed, hypoglycemic pug, making CJ want to throw an elbow into his beer gut.
She didn’t know if they put her in the back because she was a girl or because she was the drummer. When bands posed for photos, the drummer was often in the back. She didn’t much care either way. Women she’d gone to school with had spent the seventies burning their bras. Demanding access to contraceptives. Advocating for anti-domestic violence legislation and writing to their state representatives. CJ had spent it in the back.
“Would you consider yourself a feminist?” Rolling Stone had asked her last year.
CJ had tilted her head. Hadn’t answered.
“She’s a drummer,” Donny had told Blake Neely, the interviewer. “I mean good fuck, can we focus on that? She’s an amazing drummer; who cares if she’s a feminist?”
Neely had raised his eyebrows at Donny’s “fuck,” since everyone knew Donny wasn’t supposed to swear. He wasn’t supposed to drink, either, but lately he’d been drinking some, and people were curious as to whether it meant he was giving up on the Hand in All, or at least renouncing some of its stricter tenets. To believe the tabloids, Donny Times was perpetually going off the rails.
Turned Up magazine was one of the only other outlets in a decade to interview CJ alone, without the rest of Donjon. The article had turned into an expose on CJ’s fashion choices. It was just after she’d bleached her hair—Dud Smats-Hinkle’s suggestion—and started wearing blue nail polish. The article had presented her, not as an icon, but as a curiosity. Here’s a woman who clearly doesn’t give a shit about being pretty. Lookit those uncontained, pointy-ass boobs. Lookit that dyke hair. Too much eyeliner. Not enough eyeliner. Almost glam. Almost queerpunk. Not quite anything. The kind of girl your mother didn’t even think to warn you about.
CJ tried to focus now. Wiped her palms on her ripped jeans. She always had trouble with interviews—she didn’t get nervous exactly, but there was some of the contrariness her mother had always commented on. “It has to be your idea, doesn’t it? Or you won’t do it.” The very act of someone asking her a question made her not want to answer. In this industry where journalists would all but slash you across the belly to see what you’d had for breakfast, there was a certain satisfaction to remaining silent.
Charlene Villalon from The Lou This Morning, a talk show CJ had never watched, took the seat across from her. Charlene wore an orange suit with a navy sailor blouse and patent cream-colored pumps. Her matte brown hair was aggressively permed, Flashdance style. “Hello, Ms. Crespo. How are you this morning?”
CJ just nodded. There was a sharp booger in her nose she wanted to scrape out with a thumbnail, but it was too late.
It wasn’t defiance that made her refuse to answer questions. It was respect, for herself. Privacy was something she craved. Even as a kid, when she’d fantasized about being a drummer in a band, she’d fantasized about that moment after the show when she’d call goodbye to her band mates. She’d go back to her hotel, climb into bed in a room with no one else, just her. The room would be dark, and the only sound would be the echo of her own drumming in her head, the snap and crack of her snare setting a beat for her dreams.
She licked her lips. Shy, they called her. Reclusive.
Private, she wanted to say. Just . . . private.
Charlene smiled coolly. Tight brown curls spilled over her shoulders as she shifted her chair over a couple of inches.
Cameras tests and light adjustments. More powder on CJ’s face—the makeup too pale for her skin tone. Someone gave them a countdown. A red light blinked, and then they were being recorded. CJ suddenly couldn’t think about anything but the sharp booger.
Charlene leaned forward and shook her hand. “So pleased to have you with us today, Ms. Crespo.”
“Thank you.”
Charlene addressed the camera. “CJ Crespo is of course the drummer for Donjon, a band that never fails to keep us guessing. Donjon is playing the Missouri State Fair on August seventeenth, just three short days from now, so if you haven’t gotten your tickets yet, we’ll give you that number shortly. The Lou is so happy to welcome Ms. Crespo here for a chat.” She turned back to CJ. “I’ve been excited to sit down with you. I was a huuuuge Donjon fan when I was younger. And I really looked up to you in particular.” Charlene’s gaze was intent, her brown eyes outlined in what looked like Sharpie. “I have a lot of questions.”
Something about the woman’s hungry expression—and the use of “when I was younger”—told CJ exactly what sort of questions. She thought of Donny, and a soft, fist-sized ball of heat formed in her stomach.
Softball inquiries at first. Things the public already knew: growing up in Lares, Puerto Rico. Moving to New Jersey at age five. The public school where a teacher had caught her in an empty classroom during recess, drumming a desk with two pencils. CJ had to work not to look directly into the camera’s lens. She wasn’t shy. Wasn’t afraid to be on film. She just felt off balance, a little irritated. The way she’d felt since Kansas City two nights ago.
Icy fingers took that ball of heat inside her and squeezed like it was an orange—destruction contained within a thick peel, the shape of the thing now distorted.
Charlene glanced at something just over CJ’s shoulder, then refocused on CJ. “How has the music industry changed since Donjon hit it big? Do you notice any differences—either in the work you’re doing now, or in the way it gets done?”
Charlene was putting out feelers. CJ was surprised by a sudden contraction in her chest, a sadness that seemed to gather years beneath it—stringing together a childhood of drumming on desks, a fierce young adulthood during which she’d learned what fame and worship really meant, and this strange space where youth had ended like a cliff. “It is different now. I think . . . for starters, dance music has become more popular than rock, in some places. I think.”
Charlene leaned forward, and CJ felt the weight of the other woman, like Charlene was leaning right into her, trying to force an answer from her body. “How did things change for Donjon when Donny became a follower of the Hand in All?” She was straining to look attentive, maybe sympathetic, but the hunger was in every line of her face.
Well, for one thing, CJ had heard more fisting jokes than she had the patience for. “He really got his hand in all, or just you, sweetheart?” A man had asked years ago while CJ’d been smoking behind her trailer. Security had taken care of him, but CJ had stood there for a long time after she’d put her cigarette out, the night growing colder around her. Wondering if Donny fully realized what he was putting the band through, and wanting simultaneously to defend and punch him. The cunt. The selfish fucking cunt.
“Things didn’t change much,” CJ said. “We just altered our material somewhat.” She rubbed below her nose with her index finger. It didn’t do anything for the booger.
“But there was a bit of an incident with your manager, wasn’t there? I think a lot of us remember those headlines from a couple of years back.”
Dud Smats-Hinkle had been fucking furious with Donny. Would have dropped Donjon in a heartbeat and told them to find new management if it weren’t for the fact that Dud loved money and a challenge. Had genuinely believed he could spin Donny’s choice as something positive, and keep the cash flowing. “It all worked out.”
Charlene gave her a come on look—there for only an instant, but unmistakable. “And can you tell—since it is sort of obscure—can you tell our viewers more about Hand in All? I understand it’s a . . . Christian denomination?”
Mainstream Christianity wouldn’t touch HiA with a ten-foot fuckin’ crucifix. “I’m not the best person to ask. Donny is.” CJ picked at a frayed thread on her jeans. Harbor would have laughed at her. “You’ll fight a guy twice your size in a bar, but you piss your panties when someone asks you a question.”
“Didn’t you dabble in it for a while?” Charlene pressed.
CJ hesitated, her breath growing more strained. “I was never a part of that, n
o.”
“But you and your band mates, you supported Donny’s conversion?”
“It’s his life.” CJ stared past Charlene, at the curtains. “He still wanted to make music. That’s all that mattered to me. To us.”
Charlene folded her hands in her lap. On that wrinkleless orange skirt. “And because of the Hand in All, Donjon has some—restrictions on what you’re allowed to sing and write about. Correct?”
CJ wiped her chin with the back of her hand. Her nail polish was chipping. On her right middle finger, it had flaked off in the shape of a bird’s head, with a little beak. “I guess so. That’s Donny’s business.”
Charlene looked like she was a step away from kicking CJ in the shin with a cream-colored pump. “But you can give us an idea?”
CJ took a deep breath and looked up. “We made the collective decision two years ago not to sing about sex, sensuality, romance, or drug use. Hand in All’s members believe that the Creator’s hand is present in everything that we do, and that we have the choice to go where we are guided, or else resist. When we glorify carnal desire or addiction, we are resisting what’s best for ourselves and what our Creator wishes for us.”
Charlene looked startled, then pleased. “You say ‘we.’”
“That’s what they believe,” CJ said quickly, angry at herself for sounding defensive. “Me and Harbor and Mark, we support Donny. We don’t have to believe what he believes to support him.”
Charlene sat back a little, the corners of her mouth quirking up. “Ms. Crespo, I think our viewers are very curious about your relationship with Donny Times. He was such an iconic figure through most of the seventies. And even now, he remains close to our hearts.”
Even now. Slamming back every shot of bullshit this cult pours him.
“He’s a good friend,” CJ said, her throat growing dry. “I admire him tremendously.”