Welcome to the Show

by Keene, Brian

  He let the hardness seep into his grin. “No harder than they were on you.”

  Her eyes lowered, and for a moment she seemed little more than a child. A frightened child with blood smeared all over her face and torso.

  “Sometimes,” she started, but her voice was scarcely audible above Lonnie’s plinking. Raft shot the pianist a look, and Lonnie cringed, continued on pianissimo.

  “Sometimes,” Clara continued, “I imagine them coming through those doors. Coming for me and dragging me away from here. Dragging me under those docks . . . that terrible fish smell . . . their hideous chortling . . . ”

  Raft stepped around the Steinway. “They won’t bother you again.”

  She peered up at him. “You’re only one—”

  “He’s dead,” Raft said. “The creature who turned you.”

  Her lips parted, her eyes almost full blue. “But how . . . ”

  Raft knelt before her, took one willowy hand, and kissed the back of it. “Three months, Clara. It took me three months to get to you. The folks at Universal told me you’d gone to ‘Frisco, and when I arrived it didn’t take long before someone said he’d seen you. A cab driver, he said he’d taken you to the wharves.”

  “Following Lonnie,” she said. “He’d been playing poker down there, squandering his gifts.”

  “No, my dear.” Raft kissed the hand again, more fervently this time. “You’re the one who’s being squandered.”

  A harsh laugh, and when he looked up at her he saw her wipe her eyes with the back of a bloody hand. It left an auburn streak on her temple, like Egyptian mascara. “There’s no talent to waste,” she said. Eyes shimmering at the stamped bronze ceiling. “They told me so at Universal, Sid Keller said—”

  “—that if you went to bed with him, he’d give you a lead role.”

  She looked startled. “How did you . . . ”

  “Sid Keller will be dead by the end of the week,” Raft said. “There’s a young director there, William Wyler. He’s obsessed with you.”

  Clara bit her lip. “I don’t think I know him.”

  “He knows you. He heard the recording you made. He saw your screen test. Said he’d never seen someone so natural on camera.”

  Clara started to smile, but then it faded. “They won’t let me leave. The vampires by the wharf . . . ”

  “They’re dead too. All of them.”

  Clara touched her throat.

  Raft went on grimly. “They turned me the first night.” A mirthless chuckle. “I couldn’t believe it. That fucking cabbie, he was a familiar for them. Served me up like filet mignon. I spent a few days puking my guts out under the docks, shivering, sure I was on death’s doorstep.”

  Clara gazed down at him, her eyes profound. She knew exactly how he’d felt. Of course she did.

  “But the thing about me, Miss Russell, is I never know when to quit.”

  “You wanted revenge.”

  “Sure,” he allowed. “But even more, I wanted to find you. I’d told your parents I would, and I wasn’t gonna let a job go unfinished.”

  Something troubled touched Clara’s eyes, and Raft’s suspicions were confirmed. He stoppered the rage before it showed in his face.

  “Anyway, I picked them off one by one. Every couple nights, I’d take another down.” He grunted, smiled his lopsided smile. “Funniest thing about vampires. No matter how many have been staked, no matter how many have been beheaded, they always think it won’t happen to them. The bloodlust is so governing, all they can see is the victim in front of them.” Raft’s smile disappeared. “Not the monster behind them.”

  Her eyes were gentle. “You’re not a monster.”

  “I am,” he said. “I was even before they turned me. In the war, I killed so many. And this face . . . ”

  “It’s a handsome face,” Clara said. She touched his cheek, the soft fingerpads threading through the hair above his ear. It was all Raft could do not to moan aloud.

  He closed his eyes and thought, Handsome. Christ, she even seems to believe it.

  “You’re sure they’re all dead?” Clara asked, her voice soft.

  All Raft could do was give her a torpid nod. Her caresses were like harp vibrations, light and golden, yet penetrating so deep they warmed his soul.

  And though her fingertips continued to blaze rows of pleasure through his scalp, her next words came out in a toneless rush. “What about my parents? Will you tell them you found me?”

  The soul-deep hurt in her voice brought Raft to his feet, made him grasp her bare shoulders. “Your dad. He . . . did stuff to you?”

  Clara was stiff as marble in his grip.

  “Your mother let him,” Raft went on. “She goes along with whatever he says.”

  Clara didn’t speak.

  “You went to Universal to get away from your father.”

  Her eyes fixed on his.

  “And all you found was another version of him.”

  Her chest trembled, but she didn’t look away. Goddammit, the woman was a fighter.

  Raft let a thumb stroke the warm knob of her shoulder. “Why don’t we pay your dad a visit?”

  She was quiet so long he thought she wouldn’t answer. Then, “Can we pay them both a visit?”

  He was going to answer in the affirmative, but she was rocking onto her tiptoes and covering his mouth with a kiss. My God, he could have died there and then, so sublime were her lips. Waves of arousal undulated through him, but more than that, there was love. Yes, Raft thought. Love. For maybe the first time in his wretched life.

  She pulled away, eyes shining up at him. “Let’s get out of here,” she said.

  He nodded. “This place has too many ghosts.”

  Clara bit her bottom lip.

  “What is it?” he asked, making sure to keep his voice gentle. He’d have to get into the habit. Clara had experienced enough mistreatment for ten lifetimes.

  “Won’t they suspect me?” she asked. “After we’re done with my parents? After you . . . pay a visit to Sid Keller?”

  “You’ll have a different name,” he said. “Folks in pictures always do. And I was thinking . . . ”

  She peered up at him with a hope that hadn’t been there before. “Yeah?”

  “They’re saying there will be films with sound soon. A couple people I’ve spoken to, they call ‘em ‘talkies.’”

  Her eyes widened. She’d already gotten it, but he said it anyway. “A woman like you, who can sing as well as act . . . that’s a hell of a combination.”

  The good humor returned to her face. Her fingers twined with his, and with a last look, they started for the doors.

  They were nearly there when Lonnie hailed them with a weird, anguished moan. The pianist couldn’t speak, of course, but the plea in his eyes was plain: What about me?

  “You get to live,” Raft said.

  Lonnie’s shoulders drew inward, his head down.

  The pianist’s abjectness enraged Raft. He took a step toward the stage, but then he remembered: This was Clara’s problem. This was the world’s problem. Men always telling women what to do. Guys like Raft deciding matters for women like Clara. When she had twice the brains he had.

  He drew in a deep breath, faced her with his chin lowered. “Your call.”

  Clara was watching Lonnie, her lips pursed slightly, a calculating gleam in her eyes. “Let’s keep him around,” she said. “His songs amuse me. Plus, if we need errands run, Lonnie can do them.”

  Raft nodded, eyed the pianist. “You got a car?”

  “A Bentley,” Clara answered. “Last year’s model.”

  Lonnie nodded eagerly.

  “We’ll let him drive,” Raft said.

  “Only if you stay in the backseat with me,” Clara said.

  Raft glanced down at her, surprised.

  Unabashed, Clara smiled back.

  And with Clara humming “Night and Day and in Between,” Raft walked hand-in-hand with her out of the Shantyman.

  IN T
HE WINTER OF NO LOVE

  John Skipp

  The street was a neon nightmare, a low-rent Disneyland of sleaze down which Marcie tromped in army boots. It was cold—at least for California, with the chill November wind blowing in off the ocean—and in her ankle-length coat of ratty fur, she felt like the least-naked woman on the strip.

  All around her, the strip clubs, sex shoppes and movie theaters splayed posters of beautiful brazen women in their undergarments or less, the most revealing of them covering their nipples with their own hands, or somebody else’s. Only three of the women in the posters were her.

  It let her know where she stood in the pantheon of fuckability, if nothing else. And she rated pretty high, if you trusted the hungry hungry hippies sharing the sidewalk with her.

  “Hey, baby. Hey, baby. You’re bee-yooooo-teefull,” crooned the scrawny black junkie at the corner, by the liquor store. He wasn’t a pimp, but he sure dreamed of being one. She could see the glazed dollar signs in his eyes.

  “Yeah,” she said. “So what else is new?”

  He laughed like that was the funniest thing he’d heard all night, though she bet he laughed like that all the time. She tried to imagine him before his idealism peeled off, if he ever had any at all. Then again, her own wasn’t doing so hot these days, either.

  Compassion, baby, she reminded herself. Everybody’s hurting out here. Tonight, if nothing else,was all about the compassion.

  In another world, things would have played out differently. In her dreams, they most certainly had. In her dreams, she kept her heart intact, and let her mind flow free.

  But tonight, the red light was against her, so Marcie lit a smoke while she waited to cross, the cold wind blowing out three matches before she finally got it fired. She only had two packs of matches and five cigarettes left to get her through the night, until some moneyed gentleman or lady ponied up and bought her another day in paradise.

  This was not the groovy San Francisco she’d dreamed of.

  But it sure as shit was the one she got.

  ***

  The sexual revolution was already decaying by the time Marcie made it to the free love capital of the world, in the summer of 1969. She had traveled a thousand miles times two, all the way from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, escaping the crew-cut legions of clueless men and finger-waggling helmet-haired Christian women who all wanted to call her a whore just because she loved to fuck, and was not ashamed of it.

  She was only 16 in ‘67, when the actual Summer of Love went down. Two more years of high school before she could possibly break free. But she followed the news of the emerging rebellious youth culture mounting there, and more importantly, listened to the far-out sounds emanating from that mecca: The Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Country Joe and the Fish’s “Feel Like I’m Fixin’ To Die.”

  She was particularly intrigued by Janis Joplin of Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane: one flagrantly screaming out her naked love and need, in the most powerful terms possible; the other a mysterious witchy woman who spoke in code, but expressed her power not a speck less clearly.

  Marcie wasn’t sure which one she wanted to be—a moot point, since she couldn’t sing a note to save her life—but she knew where she wanted to be. She wanted to be where the action was. She wanted to be part of changing the world. So the Monday after graduation, she packed her paisley rucksack with a couple changes of her hippest clothes, stole $137 from her dad, wrote a goodbye note, and hit the highway thumb-first on her way to the West.

  The first guy to pull over had a brand new VW van with a GAS, GRASS, OR ASS—NOBODY RIDES FOR FREE bumper sticker slapped across its glove compartment. His name was Dewey, which pretty much described his eyes the second she got in the passenger seat. Even his long, scraggly ponytail popped a boner.

  “Oh, wow,” he said. “You look like Jane Asher. Or that movie star, Sharon Tate. Anyone ever tell you that?”

  “Not since breakfast, baby.” Cracking herself up with how easily those saucy words sprang to her lips. “So how far are you going?”

  “How far are you going?” with a cuddly apelike leer.

  “All the way to San Francisco, lover,” she said. “It’s gonna be groovy. You wanna come?”

  And come he did, all the way across the country. She was low on gas and grass, but she had plenty of the third; and when he’d start to nod out at the wheel, sticking her hand in his pants always seemed to perk him up. In this way, they made it all 2,173 miles in just five days, with plenty of time in Dewey’s optimistic little back-of-the-van love nest to make it worth everyone’s while.

  Dewey thought he was going to college in New Mexico, maybe joining a band, but she quickly changed his mind. His parents, of course, went out of their gourds. But if this was free love, he wanted waaaay more of that particular slice of the Age of Aquarius.

  When they landed in the Haight, second week of June, they thought they were in paradise. There was the Fillmore West, the Avalon Ballroom. All their favorite bands, performing nightly. And the streets were overflowing with colorful characters, psychedelic art, posters for protests and rallies and Be-Ins every which way they turned.

  To see it all laid out before you like that, you’d think the war in Vietnam was really going to end. That equal rights for women and minorities was really going to happen. That you could reject Madison Avenue and the military/industrial complex, live a life that was simpler, more spiritual and free, less crawling with ancient dogma and narrow-minded dogshit.

  But it didn’t take long to figure out that they weren’t the only people who came here without a plan. Because there was no plan. There was only a dream. And for every dreamer who landed even the smallest of happening gigs, there were six hundred others just wandering around, desperately hoping they could bum a next meal, talk someone into letting them crash at their pad, survive long enough to not give up and go back to their parents’ basement in Ohio, or Vermont, or wherever the hell they came from.

  Marcie and Dewey were able to keep finding overnight parking spaces while they sussed out the scene. But those spots were in increasingly scary neighborhoods. Pretty soon, they were spending more time in the Tenderloin than the Haight, watching middle-class creeps cruise for hookers in drag or otherwise, on their way in or out of pornographic clip shows and tittie bars.

  Marcie being Marcie, it didn’t take long for her to make friends, or something like them. The appetite for beautiful women was bottomless in every social circle, and she definitely ranked. They found themselves invited to lots of parties, including orgies where she passed herself around first with gleeful abandon, then increasing discernment: learning who to screw just how and when, in order to get her foot in the door. And it wasn’t like Dewey wasn’t getting laid. Just not half as much as she was.

  She landed a part-time job at a hip record store—not enough to live on, but definitely enough to help—and met tons of musicians breaking in from the margins. This was ostensibly good for Dewey, too, as he was pretty good on bass. And she was totally rooting for him.

  The problem was he wasn’t that good. Not enough to stand out in this incredibly competitive crowd, where originality was key.

  Worse, he still thought he was her boyfriend.

  That’s when shit started to get weird between them.

  “Which part of ‘free love’ don’t you understand, Dewey?” she ranted, in one of their increasingly frequent arguments. “I came here to discover, and experience, and grow. Not to be dragged down.”

  “And I came here to be with you, Marcie!” he threw back. “That’s what you don’t understand!”

  “Oh, baby,” she said, pulling him close. “I’m with you right now, aren’t I?” Then she put her tongue in his ear, which always made him weak-kneed, and they settled back down on his filthy mattress for a quick one that was far more sad than joyous.

  Afterward, as she held him while the tears wore streambeds down his cheeks, he muttered, “I though
t we came here to change the world. But the world’s just changing us. And I don’t like it.”

  She nodded and turned, lit a stick of incense, helplessly thinking there wasn’t enough sandalwood and patchouli oil in the world to get the stink out of this van. And though it pained her deeply to admit it, that’s when she knew they were coming to the end.

  Better luck next life, she thought. And found herself wishing that next life would come a littlesooner than later. Because this one was really starting to suck.

  As the weeks dragged on, he had nothing but the money he increasingly begged from his parents, slowing to a trickle as their patience wore thin. Meanwhile, she found that stripping was a great, easy way to make quick cash. And when the opportunity to shoot a couple of scenes with some of the ladies came up, she was not about to ixnay $100 for fifteen minutes of going down on Mitzi or Darla. She was already doing that action for free.

  The day after she found her own apartment, and did a cosmic three-way on acid with the drummer from Ultimate Spinach and a psychic healer named Wowza Majeur—to which he was not invited—Dewey found the needle in a parking lot with a passel of other smackhead losers. And that was that. Now he was needy on every level. And she just couldn’t do it.

  The day they broke up—August 9th, one week before Woodstock staged the last great gasp of the flower power generation—was the day Sharon Tate was found murdered. Marcie came home to the sight of the front page story, taped to her door, with Tate’s name crossed out and her own in its place. Beneath it, he had scrawled YOU’RE DEAD TO ME. And that was the last time they spoke.

  It had been five months now since they landed, almost three since they’d seen each other. But when she heard he got a gig with the house band at some dive called The Shantyman, she figured she owed him at least this much.

  Which brought her, at last, to The Shantyman’s door. With the little sign out front that said:

  TONITE!

  BLACK SUNSHINE

  ***

  There was a $3 cover, collected by the balding troll at the ticket kiosk. He licked his lips as he gave her change, let his gaze linger uncomfortably long. Pretty standard skeevy male chauvinist behavior. She rolled her eyes and strolled inside.