by AnonYMous
“We’re working on the one Mark and Donny came up with last week!” Harbor looked around for support. He scanned the pages again. “It’s got ‘desire’ right there in the title. Don can’t sing it.”
“Don’t forget CJ,” Mark mumbled. “Now she’s into this weird religious thing too.”
CJ flinched. “Not really,” she muttered. She and Donny had tried to keep it a secret a few weeks back, when he’d become her Guide and started her on her own path toward jacking off the Creator or whatever. But the others had figured it out in no time.
In the two weeks since she’d given away her vessel in Newark—such a freeing act, though Donny had been chilly toward her ever since—she’d been struggling to decide whether she wanted to keep going with HiA. She wasn’t seeing much in the way of results.
“People want songs about real shit.” Mark slammed his fist on the table. “Why can’t we just acknowledge that?” He turned to Donny. “I respect you so much, man. But I need to make money. And we’re not making money.”
Harbor addressed Mark. “We agreed we weren’t gonna have this argument again.” CJ watched with interest as Harbor prepared to defend Donny. She and Harbor had never particularly clicked. They’d maintained a sort of congenial indifference toward each other over the past decade. But Harbor loved Donny. It wasn’t Mark’s puppy-like devotion, or CJ’s standoffish admiration. It was simply an old, true friendship.
CJ joined Harbor in lecturing Mark. “So only sex is real shit? It’s all got to be ‘Love Gun’ or ‘Jungle Fever’? You can’t have real songs about anything else?”
Mark shook his head. “You can’t rock about a fucking clover meadow, or, like, ‘I ate a pack of pretzels the other day . . .’”
CJ pointed at him with a shrimp tail. “Springsteen’s making a killing writing blue collar anthems—”
“—and about girls he’s knocked up.”
CJ’s anger rose, though she wasn’t sure why. She agreed with Mark. She just wanted him to be wrong. “Lots of songs don’t contain sex. ‘Fool on the Hill.’ Tons of stuff by the Beatles, really. ‘Livin’ on a Prayer.’”
“Gina and Tommy better be married if they’re whispering to each other in the night.”
Harbor snapped his fingers. “‘After the Gold Rush.’”
“Drugs.”
“He only felt like getting high,” CJ pointed out.
Mark’s voice rose. “We were known for filthy songs. Then suddenly we weren’t. And it’s killing us.”
Harbor shook his head. “We do have fans. Old fans who love us no matter what we do. New fans who only like us because we sing about clean stuff.”
“It’s not enough,” Dud said bluntly. He turned to the still-silent Donny. “The problem is, you’re not writing ‘Fool on the Hill.’ You’re writing bland songs about bland shit, and you’re infusing them with creepy cult messages.”
CJ was stunned. She’d known Dud was pissed about Donny’s conversion, but since the initial blowout two years ago, she’d never heard him openly criticize it before.
Dud went on, speaking to all of them. “If you don’t do something to pull yourselves up, we’re all in trouble. You can’t keep the rock audience because they think you’ve become a joke. You can’t get the Jesus audience because they think Donny’s in a cult. Which he is.”
Donny still didn’t respond.
CJ’s heart thudded. HiA did feel like a cult. The shit Donny had been teaching her over the past few months, about how to purge herself of base urges and dedicate her music to her Creator and map a path for herself and all that . . . it was like her childhood Catholicism on crack. She was suddenly embarrassed she’d ever let Donny talk her into it.
“Fuck! Come on.” Harbor jerked the pages through the air. “Irregardless of what it’s about, it’s a terrible song. And it’s not ours.”
Mark grabbed a crab leg. “Irregardless isn’t a word.”
“Fuck you.”
Dud rubbed the dough under his chin. “Kurt knows the market. Pop’s kicking rock’s ass. Sap ballads like this are replacing blues anthems. You may not be happy about it, but this song’s a chance to show the dregs of your fan base that Donjon can still connect with people. That you’ve still got something to say.”
Harbor gripped the pages so tightly they crumpled. “Except we didn’t say it! And pardon me, but my son could play this on his fucking Fisher Price keyboard.”
Donny stared at the pages and began to sing, softly:
“Black hair, eyes like distant fire,
She is dancing on a wire,
She drives the chariot of desire . . .”
CJ looked over at him.
“You’re gonna sound great on this one, Don.” Dud seemed relieved to hear Donny singing it. “I mean, you always sound great, but this . . . Kurt wrote it for you.”
CJ stared at her copy of the music, making the black lines and dots run together. Donny was the only one in the band who could read standard notation. CJ didn’t even understand the sheet music she held. When they wrote songs together, they improvised, then recorded.
Harbor listened to Donny for a moment, then slowly relaxed his grip on his own pages. Joined Donny with a harmony on the next verse:
“Her skin, hot coals beneath my hands,
She is the one who understands
The endless tread of broken feet
On shifting sands . . .”
CJ joined at the bridge, and she and Harbor oooh-ed softly behind Donny:
“The chariot that takes me home
Is one I’ll ride in all alone.
But the chariot that is taking me high-er
Is the chariot of desi-uhr . . .”
They all looked at Mark, who rolled his eyes. Donny, CJ, and Harbor went for gold.
“She’s my ev-erythiiiiiiiiing
She gives my desire wings
Together we’ll see what forever brings.”
Mark was fighting a smile now. They continued:
“In this endless dream of fire
I see her DAN-cing on a wire
She drives the chariot of desire,
The chariot o-of desire,
Hey love you’ve found another buyer . . .
The chariot of desire . . .”
They were all over the place by the end, and Mark was laughing so hard he almost choked. Donny was grinning—the biggest smile, CJ realized, that she’d seen from him in some time.
“What the fuck is a chariot of desire?” Mark groused, growing serious again.
“A metaphor,” said Dud Smats. “For fucking.”
They all looked at Donny. CJ waited, wondering if he would actually agree to it. The song was about a girl. Most songs were, even the ones about good friends, worthy pursuits, lost youth, places, cars, and war. Mark was right. Nobody really rocked about anything but desire.
Donny looked at Dud Smats. “I can’t sing it.”
Dud’s jaw set. “What? You just did.”
“Not onstage.” Donny leaned back. His long hair was lank today. Purple half circles under his eyes. “You know I can’t. It’s not appropriate.”
CJ looked away.
Mark leaned forward, clearly furious. “Don. Why are you still pretending? Huh? We know you still drink. We know you still get high.”
“Mark—” Harbor said.
“We’re pretty sure you still bang chicks.”
“No,” Donny said forcefully. “I don’t do that.”
A short silence followed.
CJ took in a deep breath. Because sex leaches your creativity? Because it’s base? That’s bullshit. You know it’s bullshit.
Donny pushed his chair back and stood. “I agree with Harbor. We’ve always written our own stuff. Even if it were Hand-appropriate, I wouldn’t do it.”
Dud sighed. He looked, for an instant, deeply and genuinely pained. “Donny . . . ”
But Donny was already out the door.
*
Usually, Harbor and Donny wro
te the songs. Mark wasn’t much of a songwriter, and CJ didn’t have Donny and Harbor’s flair for humor. Donjon’s early songs had been along the lines of “She’s Got Class”—crude, a little bit funny, all celebrating something primal and male. They’d been excited by their early success, but CJ had always assumed the band would remain sort of tongue-in-cheek, low-brow, jukebox entertainment. Except Donny’s range—that powerful voice, that inexplicable charisma—got far more notice than their material. So they’d signed with Dud Smats-Hinkle, they’d let themselves be groomed, and they’d tackled the rock scene with boozy ferocity. Five years had passed in a blur. She’d stepped onto the tour bus for the first time, nervous and alive. She’d shared joints with Harbor the whole ride to Philly.
The first time she saw Donny bring a girl back to his hotel room after a concert, CJ was a bit stunned, a little hurt—though she didn’t know why. She countered by sleeping with the room service delivery guy at their next hotel. She lost her fear of God’s wrath in a haze of mood alterers and slick bodies, but she never lost her fear of spoiling her friendship and artistic partnership with Donny by fucking him. So she learned not to flinch when she saw him whispering into the ears of groupies, making them giggle. When she glimpsed him kissing a journalist in Boston, or a married makeup saleswoman in Memphis. Or, once, the sound guy. She laughed when she learned they’d both slept with the same nervous banker in Atlanta on separate nights. But inside, always, she was that girl on the couch in the alley, flushed with a desire she couldn’t contain, that had a rhythm shy couldn’t shake.
They once tried to write a song together, just the two of them. July 1980. They were in the common area of a connected suite in Philly, passing a whiskey bottle back and forth, Donny cracking jokes that belied a much more serious and violent restlessness in his mood. CJ discovering that with just a few soft words: “Shut up, shithead.” “Quit being an anus,” she could tamp down that swell of restive frustration every time, make him smile.
“We ought to write one of those really cheesy songs that everyone’s humping the shit out of now,” he said, sniffing and wiping under his nose. His leg bounced under the table.
“Mm.” CJ swigged. Her eyes burned and watered. “Power ballad?”
“Kinda, yeah. It’s gotta be really intense, though. Undying love. You know?”
“Mm.” She stared at the shiny wood of the table.
She wanted to say they should write a real song, not some corny joke. The song should be from a woman’s point of view, and should be about that desire CJ had felt beside Donny on that couch years ago. But he was already off on a tangent. “Gotta be, like, a running metaphor, you know? Like, the ‘castle of our love,’ or the—I don’t know, the ‘passion cave.’”
She grinned. “I would totally go to the passion cave. It sounds like the kind of place I’d return from with passion crabs.”
He laughed. “Right. But you know.”
“Yeah, I know. The fucking . . . love train. The love bus. The dump truck of our love—your love; there it is. The dump truck of your love.”
“Yes!” He jumped up from the table, banging his knee and limping in a tight circle. “God, yes. I don’t know if it’s a ballad though. Sounds kinda hard rock.” He swiped at an imaginary guitar and doo-wopped the intro to Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love.” “I’ve been waitin’ so long. To get fuck-in’ buried. By the dump truck of your lo-o-o-o-ooo-ve . . .”
She cackled.
He pulled her up from her chair and danced her around the room. They knocked over a standing lamp and a bowl of Jordan almonds. He stopped suddenly, and they stared at each other. There were lines in his forehead that she hadn’t noticed before. And around his mouth. His breath ruffled her recently cropped hair. She felt that surge of heat in her again, the sense that it could do permanent damage, to try to contain something this wild. But instead of kissing her, instead of backing her into the bedroom so they could do what they ought to have done eight years ago, he said, “Can I talk to you about something?”
“Sure.” She was lightheaded, disappointed. Curious.
He squeezed her hands, then let go. Stood there with his thin, muscular arms at his sides. “Do you know about the Hand in All?”
She frowned slightly. “The cult?”
“No. No, no, no—they’re not . . . That’s a misconception. It’s sort of like a religion, but not as fucked up as Christianity or . . . So, some of it’s the same. There’s a God, a Creator. But it’s a program of—of guidance.” He gave a tiny, choked hiccup, and laughed again, nervously. “It’s all about positivity, not damnation and shit like that.”
“Where’d you hear about this?”
“A Guide talked to me after the show the other night. Nice guy. I wonder if—Because I never wanted to be so . . . so, so—self-centered? I mean, I’ve always been that way. I just—if I reoriented my life so it’s more about service to my Creator rather than asking people to worship what I create . . .”
“You’re talking too fast. Slow down.” She wanted to take his hand. Or punch him in the mouth. What the hell was he going on about? Hand in All was some kind of creepy Charlie Manson thing. She knew from the news that it had spawned at least one serial killer. She couldn’t imagine Donny—open-minded, an artist—falling for that bullshit.
“Sorry.” He dropped his head slightly. She could do it—reach up, stroke his cheek. Touch him.
He was jittery again, blinking rapidly.
“Sorry,” he repeated. “I get so freaked out sometimes. Just . . . how fast this has all gone.”
“I know.”
“I worry about whether we can keep going like this. And it makes me do stupid shit. All the worrying.”
She’d seen the flare-ups of temper, the way he used Mark as TP for his shitstorms. The increase in alcohol and drugs, the song lyrics that made little sense. “We’ll be okay,” she said. “We’re just getting started.”
“I changed my name,” he whispered.
“So did Harbor.”
“I know.”
“Donny Times is cooler than Don Johnson.”
“Not really.”
“But you don’t need this . . . this group.” CJ thought of the Catholic Church. The way she’d relied on it, despised it, been enchanted by its occasional benevolence and sense of community, and terrified of its stern and constant disapproval. “You gotta know—like, I was fucked up for years because of the Church. You can’t try to be someone else’s definition of good.”
He smiled ruefully. “How else do I fix this? I drink too much. I let myself get out of control. I spend too much time fucking and not enough time writing. I need—someone else. Does that make sense? It can’t just be me.”
Then let it be me. Can’t I help you? Can’t we . . .? “We could do it together. Quit drinking so much. Keep each other in check.”
He gazed at her. Funny that he was the one person she felt comfortable saying anything to, and yet she was suddenly aware of all the things she’d never said to him. Not just about how much she wanted him, but about how aimless she felt sometimes. How much she missed her parents. Her parents, who she only saw once or twice a year. Who’d all but stopped calling after too many headlines about CJ’s bar fights.
CJ could remember sitting on the steps one night in their house in Jersey, a week before her confirmation ceremony. Listening to her mother and father talking in soft voices.
“I can’t let the church ruin a girl,” her mother said. “The boys will be okay.” She was talking about CJ’s three brothers. “They’ll survive. But a girl . . . I can’t.”
“So just what do you think we should do? Cancel her confirmation?”
“Maybe so.”
Her father had refused, and her mother had never brought it up with CJ. CJ had been confirmed in a white dress on a rainy day in June at St. Paul’s.
She never told Donny about that. Or about her own fear of the way the past eight years had blurred by, rocketing them higher and higher without o
ffering a plan to bring them safely back down to earth.
“I don’t know,” he whispered. “It might not work.”
CJ breathed out, her head dipping slightly. She didn’t answer.
His hand came up slowly, and she tensed as she waited to see what he’d do. His palm landed awkwardly on her shoulder, static popping as his skin brushed the fabric of her shirt. How could he be so sure of himself onstage and so clumsy here?
“You’re trouble, Donny,” she said, very softly, gazing sideways at his hand.
He laughed. “Not too much, I hope.”
“Nah.” She ducked her head, not sure what to do with this ongoing contact. “Not too much.”
By the time she’d made the decision to try to put her hand over his, he’d stopped touching her. He’d backed away.
Chapter 5
August 12th, 1983
“Black hair, eyes like distant fire . . .” Donny sang to CJ, one week before the Sedalia show. They were in the bar of the Ritz Carlton in Kansas City. He’d had four whiskey and sodas and made two trips to the bathroom to puke. His tolerance had gone down to nothing over these past two years of avoiding alcohol. Or trying to. The bar was moderately crowded. Nearby, security kept fans and photographers at bay.
“You look like a cat’s asshole,” CJ told him as he signaled for another Jack and coke.
It stung a little. Used to be he’d have laughed, but he was growing increasingly vain and insecure as he aged.
They’d learned “Chariot of Desire,” the four of them. Over the past few months, they’d tried it out, just to see how Donny felt singing it. He liked singing it. It was a terrible song, but it reminded him of all the sappy ballads he used to cover in bars, back when he’d been Don Johnson and the Storm Boys. It let him be as theatrical as he wanted. And it didn’t feel wrong, to sing those words. He searched himself sometimes during his daily meditative sessions. Tried to decide if his desire to perform the song onstage came from a place of ego or not. Whether the Creator might be able to give him a pass on this one. Yet when he had his check-in phone calls with Christopher, the Guide placidly running through a list of questions—“Have you had any alcohol in the past two weeks?” “Have you had improper thoughts about married or unavailable women?” “Have you put your own wishes over the needs of those around you?” “Has a woman tried to tempt you to her bed?”—he was afraid to bring it up. To ask permission.