Sin Delicious

by Willow Sears

  “It might look sexy now,” said the model, “but do you think it will look quite so good when you are sixty?”

  “Sixty?” replied my incredulous lover, quick as a flash. “I’ve absolutely no intention of living beyond forty!”

  She didn’t actually succeed in getting past 26, and I haven’t found it possible to get too close to anyone else since.

  I kept up a business relationship of sorts with Sindee over those next impossible months. I think she was often looking out for me, trying to keep me busy and focussed when I was set adrift. The freelance design team took me on, to continue the work I had started, but I found it difficult to do it with the same heart and soul as before. Sindee, meanwhile, had got her big break and was about to be propelled into the spotlight. She commissioned me to do some outfits for the upcoming tour and I found the impetus to do it by resurrecting some of the designs Elowen and I had worked on together. Top of the tree was a catsuit in shiny red latex, the back with a cut-out in the shape of flames, the front having a built-in plastic appendage at the groin – Elowen’s idea – smooth and curving like an erection but with a tip not like a man’s but pointed, like a devil’s tail.

  Sindee declared it the most fabulous garment ever seen and me a genius. She got all gooey over me. I was sat there besides her having modelled the devil suit and she had her hand around the groin appendage, stroking it up and down. She was grinning at me and saying how beautiful and talented I was and then she had her big idea. Remembering that I had taken a few snaps during one of our catwalk shows she declared me a photographer. She wanted one on tour with her, to be beside her at all times, since this was likely to be the most incredible, debauched adventure she would ever embark upon and she wanted pictorial evidence of her sexy shenanigans, since she thought she might be too drunk and too high to remember most of it. I was to be her Official Fucktographer, as she put it. If she was going to bed some of the biggest names in rock, she wanted something solid as a reminder.

  “I want you to create a photo album of my sexual exploits, with a bit of writing thrown in to give some context,” she told me. “I want you to capture every cool guy and hot bitch I end up with in all their naked glory. I don’t want any kiss-and-tells crawling out the woodwork with faces or tales I can’t recall. It’s my story so I want to be the one doing all the telling. It will be a fabulous and indisputable account of how I played and partied and screwed my way around the continent, with you there to gather the evidence. It will be the most famous sex journal ever. We’ll call it Rock Chicks and Cock Pics and when the tour is over we will publish it together and become millionaires off the royalties.”

  She thought it a brilliant idea although I told her there might be some legal issues over the book being made available to the public. I think I pointed out that some famous guys might object to having a third party present to snap shots of their erection just prior to them putting it inside her, but then I’d never been on a rock tour before. I might have suggested that she would have better memories if she moderated the booze and drugs, but I wasn’t then aware that rock stars did everything to the max simply because they could. It was compulsory. She wasn’t listening to me anyway. She said she would siphon off some of the tour budget to pay me, although essentially my ‘wages’ were just payment of bed and board; a free trip around Europe and beyond, all inclusive. If I could prove to her that I had more pressing projects at home that I needed to take care of, then I could stay behind. If not, I had to go with her. I had to admit that I hadn’t.

  “Pack your bags then, baby,” she said with a huge grin, “because you’re coming with me to heaven.”

  Chapter Three

  Love Song

  As I sit upon the bus driving through another anonymous night-time, studying the frame I captured only a couple of hours ago, I witness more evidence of what is fast becoming an incontrovertible truth: that this road-trip adventure of debauched promiscuity might unexpectedly be turning into a tale of love. Sure, one has to peer close through the haze of hormones and drugs and frivolous lust to see it. It wasn’t immediately obvious but the camera helped me focus. Suddenly there it was in the way she looked at him when she thought no one was watching. It was there in his eyes when they were together but apart, in the way her breath caught when he walked into the room.

  I thought they were just two hotties who naturally wanted to jump each other’s bones, but now it seems their feelings have reared up and got all serious. Once you notice, you see it in every little thing between them. The frisson is there for sure. You have to blot out all the lewdness, the noise and the craziness that surrounds this way of life, but in the middle is them, growing closer, more vital to each other by the day. Suddenly the attraction has gone way beyond lust. It is a shame then that he is married to someone else. That someone is right there in the photo I’m looking at, clinging to her famous rock star husband for dear life. But the picture has captured his very thoughts, and they are not of her.

  I might have considered the thing between Sindee and this man to be little more than playground lust, since Thunderhed only joined up with the Coliseum All Stars/Death in Venus tour a fortnight ago and this shouldn’t have been long enough for any hearts to be lost – especially with the little contact there has been between the two of them and the fact that Mrs Thunderhed was so often on the scene. However, just a couple of days ago I became privy to information that told of a longer history between the two – one Sindee herself is still unaware of. I got these truths from the horse’s mouth, from Thunderhed’s manager, no less. He spilled these spicy beans when I was stuck in a hotel lift with him after Nils Spacey of Coliseum All Stars found the fuse box down in the kitchen and switched most of them to off because a flickering fluorescent tube was freaking him out.

  I think perhaps the manager thought there might be some naughty action on the cards, what with us stuck all alone in that lift, and with me being all young and feisty and sultry and him being a sprightly late-forties and chunky and moustachioed. Maybe he thought that making me his confidante made him suddenly more attractive; that sharing these secrets might somehow magnetise my body to his, or at least have me thinking I shouldn’t dodge any lustful lunges coming my way. However, I am probably the only one on this tour who doesn’t think that every opportunity, however unlikely, had to be converted into a sexual extravaganza just for the fuck of it. Thus once the information was extracted, I promptly sat down to ponder it, leaning against the lift wall with knees drawn up under my chin, which pretty much put the kibosh on any saucy advances he might have had in mind.

  The tale he told me of Sindee and the Rock Star was this: Once upon a time in California, more than quarter of a century ago now, a child was born, named Jimi Casanove. His father was a U.S. Marine right up to the point he was shot dead outside a bar by a man he had earlier brawled with. His mother was a stoner who sometimes worked at a local radio station. Jimi grew up tough and wayward, passed around from relation to relation when his mother couldn’t deal with him. He got kicked out of every school. He was big and angry, and arrogant in a way that people who believe the world to be against them can be. He was a natural-born fighter who wanted to come out on top. Jail might have been beckoning but since he had been given a rock star name, he decided instead to join his cousin’s band as the singer.

  That cousin was a decent guitarist with some nifty riffs that he’d turned into half a dozen good songs. He was all about the music. He was very much grunge-inspired and although quite heavy the band had a sombre feel. They had a decent local following of serious, boot-faced, check-shirted, near-suicidal teens. In short, the whole set up had all the charisma of a root vegetable. The newly-named ‘Cas’ Casanove was all about showmanship. He couldn’t even conceive of being in a band without all the associated glamour. He wanted booze and drugs and bitches on tap, or what was the point? He didn’t want grunge; he wanted good old fashioned rock and roll – and not the darker, sinister thrash metal, but the type that harked back to th
e days of Rock Gods and Rock Excess.

  The band, having let him in, weren’t powerful enough to stop him. They shed a drummer for being too ugly. Cas, who still knew little about musicality, hand-picked a new one. Hair was ordered to be grown even longer. Drab clothes were burnt whilst tighter, harder, more ridiculous outfits were assembled. Cas himself often took to the stage in a shirt of chain mail, along with leather pants, thigh-high leather boots and a large metal cod-piece. If nothing else, it must have been hot as hell under it all. One time he did a show in just the boots and cod-piece. Another time he did it in just the boots and mail shirt, and got arrested for indecency. Whatever, the check-shirt brigade got left behind and the fast-growing new audiences were louder, happier, and far prettier.

  Their shows were once described as ‘camp theatricals versus violence’. Cas was boundless and untameable on stage and he could do and say and wear whatever he wanted because he could always punch his way through any of the negativity coming at him. One time he poured vodka all over his microphone stand, set fire to it, and javelined it into the audience. In doing so he got an electric shock off the mic lead and shorted out half the theatre. When the lighting guys restored power he was still there, spark out on his back upon the stage. To the delight of the cheering crowd he resurrected himself, staggered around for a bit, and then grabbed a new mic and continued exactly where he’d left off. Sometimes you have to die to make your name. Other times just nearly dying is good enough.

  The crucial thing was they had a guy that could write good songs and a front-man who proved to be not only larger than life but a pretty good rock singer too. The rest of the band quickly saw the attraction of this new fame, immersed themselves into it, and Thunderhed were born. They already had a reputation for excess before they had even released their first record. This only increased their following. One effect of the rock biz is that the more mad, bad and dangerous to know you are, the more people crave to be a part of it. If you can create a whirlwind, you will soon discover that those around find it almost impossible to run from you. They want to be sucked in.

  On the back of a mini Stateside tour, plus some handy phone-shot footage that went viral of a huge bar fight the band got mixed up in, their first album debuted at home in the top ten and climbed to the heady heights of number three. The footage in question shows a glass-chucking, Wild West-style brawl, the highlight being when Cas is seen brandishing a table above his head, ready to hurl it, when some sneaky devil comes up behind him and thwacks him across the backside with a chair. Cas doesn’t even budge. He carefully sets the table down, turns around, and lays the guy out with one punch. All the comments below this clip include the word ‘legend’.

  Their second album, Valhalla Calling, went platinum at home and across the world. If ever you wondered why these rock groups carry on with this life-endangering cocktail of work and excess of pleasure, then be assured that once an ego is set rolling it is very hard to stop. Success is the heaviest of addictions, the hardest to break. Excess is the proof of success. Any sign that the bandwagon is still rolling is thus to be celebrated. It can never be tired of, even if the excess is killing you. An example: after a gig in Toronto there was a huge all-night party at the band hotel. Come morning, bodies littered the suite. The air was flammable with booze fumes, and bloodstreams were still dangerously loaded with narcotics. The casual visitor might reasonably assume a bomb had gone off. Sometime around ten a mobile phone began to ring. Sheen, the Thunderhed drummer, apparently dead on the bed, somehow got this phone to his ear and grunted into it. He then raised himself from the waist, as film vampires in coffins do, broke into a massive grin, chucked his phone straight out the window and yelled:

  ‘We’ve just gone plat in Belgium, baby!’

  Two minutes later room service had delivered a case of champagne and a tray of glasses, and it all began again. The show must inevitably go on until something dreadful stops it.

  With album number three about to break they were already too big to do much other than stadium gigs and festivals. They practically lived on the road, performing and churning out material whilst the going was good. None of them even owned a house. Any roots laid were rented and temporary. All of them were seemingly rich but none really knew how much so. They rarely carried money since most things were put on tabs and a record company accountant quietly followed them around, paying the bills and off-setting everything against record sales. Those heaps of high-grade cocaine that used to appear as if by magic, there to dive into and all apparently free, those top-class escort girls and hired porn stars at the parties, they were all being added to the record company’s tab that the band would have to pay.

  Some of their naivety might have worn off by then but the novelty hadn’t. Drink and dirty girls were still definitely at the top of the Casanove list, especially porn stars. My, how he loved porn! Those girls were his favourites. Screens on the tour bus always had some showing. One day, whilst driving through Germany, he was watching a scene from a certain adult film, and he clapped eyes upon the lady of his dreams. She was only in two scenes but he was smitten. All he knew of her was her screen name, Sindee Pink, and, judging by the accent when she cooed “fuck me, you sexy stud”, she might well be British.

  Instantly he got the tour manager onto the job of trying to track her down. This fellow did the best he could from inside the tour bus and with a non-stop schedule, but eventually farmed it out to his nephew who was looking after a Scottish rock band on their tour of Northern Europe. No news was forthcoming. No searches of the name yielded any more information or details of other works the actress had been in. The trail went cold. It cut up old Cas, the manager told me, this failure to find her. He sank deep into booze for a while, so saddened by the fact that he couldn’t locate this beauty he had never even spoken to and make him his girl. If you didn’t know better, you’d think his heart had been snatched.

  Move on about a year and Cas was dating a Playboy model he had met during a lull in touring, to help him get over the pain of losing the girl of his dreams. A burst of romantic exuberance, no doubt drink related, saw them tie the knot in Vegas. Female rock fans worldwide wept at the news and the new Mrs Casanove set about sobering herself up so that she was fit to ensure her husband changed his womanizing ways. However, out of the blue, the tour manager received a call from his nephew, who had been watching a gig in Denmark of all places, when who should walk on stage as singer of one of the support acts but none other than Miss Sindee Pink!

  Except that she was now Sindee Liscious. Being a sex maniac she had given porn a quick dabble while it seemed her first band was floundering. However, she was soon recruited to Death in Venus and her music career gained a new impetus. The dream might be possible after all. Porn was duly left behind and concerts were organised. The nephew found out the tour schedule and passed it on. Cas, with as much romance as his Vegas rashness suggested, got on the next flight out and turned up at the following show. No one but him knows his thought process at that time but he didn’t even meet up with the girl he lusted after. Perhaps he feared scandal and an expensive, disruptive divorce. Perhaps he just wished to stay honourable to his new wife. Whatever, smitten by Sindee he must still have been because, before he made a hasty return home, he had informed the Death in Venus management that they were to be added to the forthcoming Thunderhed tour as second support act!

  It’s not quite Romeo and Juliet but I’m guessing it’s about as sweet as rock and roll gets – if one leaves aside the fact that Mr and Mrs Casanove are still very much an item. He zipped in and out, practically unseen, and changed people’s lives with just a few words. It was like a lottery win for the band, who thought they had been picked on merit rather than because of a certain someone’s infatuation for their lead singer. Just imagine, though, what it must be like to have someone as big and desirable as him admire you. Think what it is to be shot from nowhere into the stratosphere because one of the most famous faces in rock music unexpectedly likes you. Then c
onsider how flattering it would be to learn that it was because he has the hots for you. It’s pretty much the best chat-up line you could ever use, without actually saying anything at all.

  The bus goes over a bump and Sindee besides me stirs in her sleep and nestles her head further into my shoulder. She can sleep anywhere, anytime. Most of us have to wait for exhaustion to take over. Some of the guys try to defeat sleep altogether, heading for the medicine chest to stay wired. Do you know they have an official drug dealer following us around on this tour? He drives at the back of our convoy in his big red Cadillac that he somehow gets shipped around full of narcotics. He dresses like a pimp and he is called the Magic Man, presumably because he gets busted every few days and yet nothing ever gets found either in his car, on his person, or on the person of the two or three beauties he is always accompanied by. However, clean as he seems, come the party that same night and he will produce enough illegal substances to wipe out ten rock bands.

  My legs are aching and I need to stretch. God knows how much darkness we have ahead of us before the lights of our hotel. There are six cramped bunks to the rear of this bus, partitioned off either side of the gangway by curtains and ostensibly for band members, although it’s not our band’s bus so that doesn’t necessarily include us. Anyway, some of the roadies are using them since they will be dropped off at the next venue along with the equipment trucks and will work for the rest of the night so that we can all do sound-checks by lunchtime tomorrow. They need their shut-eye, although judging from the slurpy sounds and saucy giggles emanating from one bunk, sleep isn’t the first thing being done behind that particular curtain.