We Sold Our Souls
Page 25
This strange thing
With its wings
Kris stumbled over the notes, her left and right hands getting out of sync, and the song screeched to a halt. She took a breath and started again, feeling Scottie Rocket’s invisible hands on hers, guiding her fingers, and the roar came back. Up here everything felt epic, felt mythic, felt like magic, and lyrics that had been written in the basement of the Witch House came out of Terry’s throat like an incantation.
Makes me know
That it’s so
Beyond the pain
And the shame
And the blood
And the screams
Past the flood
Of the fire
And the King
And his choir
Beyond the torture
And the wire
And the guts
And the gore
There’s a door.
Listening to the roar of the dark ocean, Kris knew why this album was a threat. This was the crack in Black Iron Mountain. She turned to get ready to launch into “Down Where the Worms Squirm” and got a glimpse of Rob in the gloomy wings, his eyes bright and blazing. She didn’t acknowledge him, but as they tore into the next song she saw black-shirted security filing into the wings on either side of him, like crows.
Everything you said you wanted
Rots and falls apart
In the kingdom of the Blind King
He’ll eat your bleeding heart
Kris knew that there was no way off this stage. Not for her. She was a bullet, fired from a gun. She’d burned all her bridges, and at last she was alone, standing on an island, surrounded by this raging sea. What was it JD said? An album only plays in one direction: forward.
Next came “Sailing the Seas of Blood” and then “In the Hall of the Blind King” and then Kris delivered the buzzsaw riff that ended the song, the riff that took them into the final fight, that tore apart the night like an explosion and dropped them all into the chute that started “One Life, One Bullet.”
Military snares snapped off behind her, all harsh angry rattles that became blast beats as Tuck joined in, and Kris waited, listening to the intro batter the crowd. Her brain felt bruised. Then she slammed into the groove with them, her right shoulder aching so bad she thought it would fall off. A numbness radiated down that entire arm, and she knew if she slowed down her arm would freeze up. Terry high-stepped along the lip of the stage, lashing the crowd with the chorus, screaming:
One life
One bullet
Troglodyte
One life
One bullet
Troglodyte
The tempo built, and it grew in power and intensity until it became primal, a summoning, an exorcism, the words taking on a sound beyond their sound, notes appearing that they didn’t play. It sounded primitive, tribal, and Kris didn’t think about the end approaching, until they were there and she slammed her guitar to a halt.
While her ears still screamed with echoes, Terry launched into the chant:
There is a hole
In the center of the world
The dark ocean picked it up and 440,000 people chanted, “There is a hole / In the center of the world / There is a hole / In the center of the world / There is a hole / In the center of the world.” Kris looked back at Tuck to make a face that said, “How weird is this?” but he was already staring out at this sea and not in awe. Sweat sheeted down his face as he shouted along with them, and Kris didn’t miss a beat, she turned forward and raised her right fist and screamed along with them, because it had been there all her life, all their lives, and it was waiting to swallow them up at the end, everything that was good, everything that was free, it took everything. In the end they all fell into darkness.
And Kris realized, as she shouted her throat raw, the crowd shouting along with them, that they were guided by something larger than themselves, some greater force, some kind of holy coincidence, something huge and unseen. And at its peak, miraculously, Kris and Tuck and Terry and all 440,000 people in that crowd, they all stopped at the same time, like they’d been practicing this all their lives.
Then Terry—fucking Terry, the Blind King, the pain in the ass, the boy who tapped on her basement window, the kid who asked her the question that started everything, that caused all this pain, that sparked a thousand shows, the boy who said, “You wanna start a band?”—he grabbed his mic and right on time, right on cue, he said the words that were coming but that Kris thought he would never sing:
“And inside that hole!” Terry shouted, and the black ocean fell silent, its colossal sound held back for three seconds, its power coiling, building up, about to overflow. “And inside that hole!” Terry shouted again, “is Black Iron Mountain!”
Terry raised both fists and let the black ocean rush over him, and Kris looked back and the drummer was standing, saluting the black ocean’s roar with two raised drumsticks, and she caught Tuck’s face and he gave her a grin, and she saw all the forces of Black Iron Mountain moving into place to block her exit in the wings: Bill in his chair, with Miranda and her dreads next to him, her neck still in a brace, and Rob, and all his black-shirted crows, the Nevada Highway Patrol in their flak jackets and black latex gloves.
And in the crowd, fists pumped, bottles flew, and far in the back, someone set a merch booth on fire. And up in the sound tower Melanie shouted along with the crowd and she felt something running down her face, and the fat woman in the bow tie stood up and gave the stage a brisk little salute. And onstage, Kris stepped up to Terry’s mic one final time.
“There’s,” she started, but the black ocean broke over her and sucked her down and she was silent for a minute as she drowned. “There’s…there’s…” she repeated, trying to be heard, as the dark ocean slowly stilled and subsided, and finally, she was able to say into the darkness, “There’s one last song,” and everyone went silent. “On this album that we, um,” and here she gave Terry a look.
His makeup was running down his face, and he looked so vulnerable. He was just a little boy in love with himself, making deals without ever asking the price, thinking he’d never have to pay. She saw him, not evil, not good, just another boy who thought he was the only person in the world who mattered. So she did him a final kindness, and in her hour of truth she didn’t say that he’d cut the track, she didn’t mention the betrayal that still hurt after all these years, the way he’d just taken her baby away from her and mutilated it, and instead she said:
“We, um, lost the tracks, they got damaged so it never made it onto the album.”
And like a little boy, Terry gave her a grateful grin.
“But I want to sing it for you now. Because it’s the song that means everything on this album. Without it, Troglodyte wanders forever. Tonight, I want to bring him home. Tonight, I want to set him free.”
There was a roar from the black ocean, and Bobbie sitting at the board, shaking her head, reached over and held Melanie’s hand and said, “Sweetheart, I don’t even know what the fuck.”
Kris hesitated at the microphone, feeling the spotlight on her face. She had so much to say, and she thought about it for a few seconds which is an eternity in stage time, and finally said:
“They want to tell you what to do, what you should want. They want to control your life. And there’s so many of them. There’s too many of them,” she paused, about to say something else, but it was disappearing over the horizon of her brain and she couldn’t catch the tail of her idea, and she saw the bottom of the hole coming up fast as she fell and Black Iron Mountain was in the wings waiting, and so she let it go. “Fight,” she finally said. “Just fight. Don’t ever stop.”
The ocean crashed and thundered as Kris raised her lips to the mic and sang “The Door with Cerulean Hue.”
Up the tunnels
Out the maze
Towards the daylight
Through the caves
Every step closer
He hasn’t been here before
Every step closer
The Blue Door
She came in with a minor chord on “Blue Door” and there was no drummer, no bass player, just Kris, the ghost of Scottie Rocket standing behind her, and instead of the crows waiting in the wings she felt JD, watching the woman he’d died for play the final song of Dürt Würk’s final show.
He’s past the barricades
No longer a slave
Beyond their reach
Beyond the caves
Step by step
Out and through
These things you want
He will not do
Troglodyte seeks
The door with cerulean hue
And everyone you saved
Everyone who died
Everyone who slaved
Everyone who thrived
Everyone forgotten
Those written in stone
Everyone together
Everyone alone
They build up behind him
An unstoppable flood
A furious storm
A song made of blood
The words were a pillar of sound growing up through her feet, through her stomach, out the top of her skull, rising to the sky, suspending her on a crystal column of music between the dirt and the stars.
Step by step
Out and through
These things you want
He will not do
Troglodyte seeks
The door with cerulean hue
It wasn’t the same song, it never is, each time you play it the song changes, but the feeling remains the same. It was a song for the Dürt Würk that could have been, a song for the band that finished the last track on Troglodyte and stood in the cold basement of the Witch House looking at each other in absolute silence for a moment. Back when they weren’t a bunch of fuck-ups looking for a place to belong. Back in that moment when they knew they could be legends.
Back before they threw it all away.
Kris drew the song to a close. She’d had her forty minutes. There wasn’t anything left for her here, and so she wrapped up her song, and set Troglodyte free.
Up the tunnels
Out the maze
Towards the daylight
Past the caves
Each step closer
He’s never been here before
Each step closer
The Blue Door
A key change and she slowed her rhythm down to almost nothing, finger picking a simple riff over and over again, getting slower each time. The dark ocean was silent, listening, the burning merch booths flickering far away.
One more step
One step higher
One more body
Thrown on the fire
There is no more
It’s time to fly
It’s not a door—
It’s the sky.
One final note. A moment of silence. She looked at Terry, and Terry looked at her, and she turned to Tuck, and for a minute Dürt Würk was all that it ever could have been. For a second, Kris stood in that other world, parallel to ours, where nothing was ever broken, and all her friends were still alive, and it was never too late.
Then, the dark ocean crashed into the stage with a roar, broke over the barricades, smashed through the thin line of security, and the lightning blazed and burned and the noise deafened them all. And Kris Pulaski stood alone in the chaos, guitar on her hip, and turned to face Black Iron Mountain, a dark wave rising at her back.
KIM HUNT: What’s it like to be a woman in a metal band? Do you face any problems when you’re touring? Is it harder to get fans to respect you? And what about the image of women metal portrays? Do you think heavy metal creates positive role models for women?
KRIS PULASKI: I don’t know about all that. I just want to play.
—101.7 WFNX, “FNX Weekends”
March 23, 1994
ellstock ’19 ended in disaster. The merch booth fires were only the start of it. That night the crowd, almost half a million strong, rampaged through Strawberry Valley. They stormed the stage, trashed the equipment, tipped cell phone towers, lit bonfires. Kids ran through the flames. Two of them got burns so severe one lost an arm and one lost a foot at the ankle.
Merch booths burned to ashes, ATMs were cracked wide open, sixteen eighteen-wheelers were tipped and looted. In the morning, a vast tide of humanity surged back to their cars and drove back to Las Vegas, leaving behind a crater filled with trash, and mud, and human shit. Not a single record was salvaged. All the sign-ups, all the scanned tickets, all the names of the people who came, were lost in smashed hard drives and burned paperwork.
By the time the swirling carnival of chaos ended the next morning, there were 2,016 people awaiting medical attention, 431 arrests, Kris was missing, Terry was gone, and Tuck couldn’t get a straight answer out of anyone.
He called a few people his sister knew in law enforcement, filed a missing person’s report wherever he could, and put the word out on gig boards to keep an eye open for Kris, but Kris had disappeared, leaving nothing behind but her wig. They found it on the ground behind the drum kit. Where she went was a mystery and theories proliferated online, cross-bred and intermingled, spawned mutant sub-theories which birthed even more baroque conspiracies.
One theory said Kris had powerful enemies. Terry was connected to power brokers who controlled Hollywood. According to this theory, she was smuggled out of the venue in the trunk of Terry’s limo, and taken to a soundproof room in the basement of his house in Vegas. They’d kept her there for a few days, probably tortured her, then killed her, and buried her remains in the desert. Everyone was paid to look the other way. No one ever found her body, but evidence showed up from time to time in the sand: scraps of her leather jacket, the charred remains of her guitar, a Manowar head wrap lined with lead foil.
The other theory said Kris had escaped in the chaos. That someone saw a cleaning woman help her slip off the side of the stage. That a sound tech smuggled her out of the venue in a rolling case. This theory said that a network of metalheads got her out of the country, to someplace where heavy metal was still treated with respect.
Someone said she’d been spotted in Brazil. Other people said she was in Chile. A few claimed they’d seen her in the Philippines. Wherever they came from, they all said the same thing: this woman showed up at open mics and random shows. She’d ask to borrow a guitar and they’d let her plug in and play. Sometimes she’d tear through the classics: Sabbath, Slayer, Megadeth. She loved “Reign in Blood.” Sometimes, if the night was right, she’d play Troglodyte. More and more often, people said, she played new material. Most of it was pretty good.
She never gave her name, no one knew where she came from, and after the shows she always slipped out the back or disappeared into the crowd before anyone could get her picture. The new songs got recorded on phones and uploaded online where they were traded and obsessed over by the most passionate Troglodytes.
Some days Tuck believed one theory, some days he believed the other. But he listened to the new songs that got uploaded and he thought, yeah, they sounded like his girl. And now, today, on the third anniversary of Hellstock ’19, Tuck came out of Funky-town where he taught kids bass after school, and realized that he missed her. He didn’t want to go back to those times, and that night at Hellstock had been the most terrifying night of his life, but life always felt a little more real when Kris was around.
As he walked to his car, something familiar tickled his ears and he realized it was “Poincaré’s Butterfly.” Across the street, a girl sat against the
wall of a closed check-cashing joint, the velvet lining of her open guitar case pocked with quarters and pennies and a couple of bills. A pit bull puppy lay beside her, muzzle on his front paws, a thick rope tied around his collar. The girl had scabs all over her face and played a battered guitar. Her voice wasn’t half bad. Wasn’t half good, either.
Tuck looked in his wallet but all he had was a five-dollar bill. Then he figured, why not? He’d consider it royalties for Kris. He dropped it in the girl’s case, walked to his car, and drove home to his family, “Poincaré’s Butterfly” playing over and over again inside his head.
In LA, Bobbie Gilroy, the board tech, uploaded her pristine bootleg of Troglodyte for the nine-hundredth time while she rolled a joint and listened to her girl in the shower. She loved doing this. What had happened in the desert that night had turned into a pop culture moment, like Ozzy accidentally biting the head off that bat, or Michael Jackson catching his hair on fire shooting the Pepsi commercial. It was the kind of cultural landmark that everybody knew.
Bobbie figured she’d been put there to capture it and get that sound out into the world. Something she was proud to do because she thought it was one of the greatest performances she’d ever heard, and that wasn’t just nostalgia talking. Sure, there were plenty of technical problems, but emotionally it hit like a freight train. And her bootleg caught every second of it in perfect digital clarity. Avoiding the takedown notices had turned into a game. She was going to keep uploading this until she was old and gray. Which, come to think of it, wasn’t too far away. Then her girl was out of the shower, wet and wriggly, and she hit upload and turned her attention to more immediate matters.
In his home recording studio in Los Angeles, Terry Hunt sat alone, trying to avoid his reflection. He didn’t like seeing what Black Iron Mountain had done to punish him. Instead, he hunched over in his studio chair and listened to what he’d laid down that day. He was going to release this album. He was not going to let Hellstock ’19 be his epitaph.