The Kill Riff

by David J. Schow

  Money to bum White Trash!

  You only yearn for Cold cash!

  Let yo' dollar bills fly

  But rock and roll will never die!

  While 'Gasm squirmed through the middle set of Throw Down Your Arms, Lucas put the finishing touches on the now assembled sniper's rifle, the lethal Dragunov. Cass slept soundlessly nearby, unthreatening, uncunous. Now, if only Cory had been more like her…

  … she wouldn't have taken the high dive into the pill bottle. And Cass wasn't like Kristen. Not really. Not yet.

  With the barrel attached, the Dragunov was a few inches over a yard long and weighed a neat ten pounds fully loaded. The stock was an outline of wood, shaped like a wire stock but firmer on recoil.

  Throw Down Your Arms spun out on the small Sony screen. Lucas listened through headphones at reduced volume. He watched Tim Fozzetto, the bassist, zip out of his outrageous checkerboard jumpsuit and expose his ass to a wildly cheering audience. Boom!-throw down your pants. Just quick enough to give the crowd a thrill, then all the onstage lights snap to dead black for Pepper "Mad Max" Hartz's big solo.

  The solo spot was the part that interested Lucas.

  A cobalt-blue spotlight picked out Hartz on his special stage dais as he writhed and belabored his Stratocaster. The Fender Strat was the guitar Jimi Hendrix had annoyed the world with.

  Back in the good old days, Lucas thought, guitars had a hard time displacing the saxophone as the centerpiece solo instrument of rock'n'roll. Solos were expected to have an inner consistency of structure that made them startling or notable. A natural outgrowth of this approach, due to the outspoken lack of talent in copycat bands and encouraged by the field hands of punk in the mid-1970s, was to use the guitar not to solo, but to provide the most grating and discordant noise of any individual instrument present-a kind of Big Stick theory for music. This begat the school of guitar abuse in which the strings were kicked, bitten, hammered with the fist, subjected to wine glasses and viola bows and chainsaws and anything else that could help produce a loud, obnoxious noise. Sometimes this was innovative. Most times it was tiresome.

  Hartz pulled out the few stops he could manage. But he was a product of the bar-band rock gristmill that mistook energy for ability and desperation for outrageousness. All that was left to him was showbiz. Using a chromium phallus that dangled from his codpiece and tights, Hartz jacked his guitar off, bottleneck style.

  The stage remained in blackness, except for Hartz's spotlight, for the duration of his solo. Using the digital stopwatch function on his Seiko, Lucas had timed the solo at three minutes and three seconds. Disorganized musical support was audible but ever-changing, as one band member or another sneaked offstage for a towel, a toot, or a quick gulp of something cold. Nothing was visible except Hartz, bathed now in scarlet light as the gels on his spot were rotated. He ladder-walked his fingers up and down the fretboard. It was an embarrassing cliche by now. Lucas was almost glad Hendrix had died in his prime and was thus spared this degrading of his style.

  Rock and roll would never die, the lyrics reminded everybody. It would never grow up, either, apparently.

  Embittered, Lucas thought of the bottom-line groups, the hackers, the clone bands who ripped off anything original and blanded it out. The creators of cliches, with their exhausted vocabulary of tired lyrics. You still heard the age-old lyrics today, but they no longer held any meaning; they were square pegs that fit into the square holes of building-block, formula rock: We were made for each other. Love at first sight. Together forever. All I want is you. Softened, obfuscatory versions of songs that now bore titles like "Slitlicker." Or, on the 'Gasm live disc, "Bend 'n' Spread 'Em" and "Cock Knock."

  Gonna drive my skin bus

  Gonna drive it on down

  Right on down into Tuna town.

  The Rolling Stones, god bless 'em, had cut a song called "Starfucker." And FM deejays to this day chickened out by referring to it as "Star Star." So did the album cover. It looked like something innocuous, but it was really a werewolf.

  The sentiments expressed by this music, and the motives for writing it, were no different from those that had produced "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree" a century earlier. When you thought it out, it was all a lie.

  Lies kill people. Lies killed Kristen.

  Kristen had swallowed all the hype and horseshit and gotten road-ganged into a concrete floor. The lies of love had nearly gotten Cass murdered. Lies had given Whip Hand a comatose following of apostles who were so unaware of the field's premier stylists that they actually believed the assault and battery committed on a guitar by a Jackson Knox or a Pepper "Mad Max" Hartz could stop the rotation of the Earth on its axis. In two decades, "Maybe Baby" had become "Wang Dang Sweet Poontang."

  All the great bluesmen were laughing in their graves.

  Boom-the stage flooded with light, and 'Gasm reappeared. The conjurers had returned for the magic show. Their stage moves were so pat they virtually carried a factory warranty. Lucas fitted the sniperscope onto the Dragunov, lifted the weapon, and socketed the rubber pad to his eye.

  He was looking through a four-power scope with an integral rangefinder and a battery-powered rectile illuminator, enhanced with infrared. The whole cylindrical package was fourteen inches long. He loaded a magazine with ten rounds of 7.62-millimeter rimmed ammo and smacked it into the underside of the rifle. The Dragunov featured a flash suppressor and recoil compensator that helped to keep the barrel targeted. Muzzle velocity was 2,700 feet per second. It could kick a hole the size of a dinner plate through an oak door at eight hundred meters and made the M-16 look like a popgun by comparison. If he'd wanted truly outrageous firepower, he would have used one of those monstrous Remington riot guns-twelve-gauge pumppumps with twenty-inch barrels and folding metal stocks. The Dragunov favored skill and accuracy and was for deadly jabs in specific places, not industrial demolition.

  "What're you burning?" Cass had asked him yesterday when she'd caught him disposing of the Brion Hardin Electroshock discs in the brick maw of the barbecue. He'd told her garbage, and she'd returned to the cabin, satisfied. Cass didn't pry. That was so good.

  The rusty paring knife still jutted from the midsection of the Gabriel Stannard poster. Lucas leaned forward and levered it out. It reminded him of the way things had gone in the hotel room with Hardin-badly. Panic had come too close. He'd gotten scared, almost thought the son of a bitch would refuse to die. Not good. Expediting Stannard himself would have to be done differently, with no gutters for error. Lucas dumped the paring knife into one of the supply boxes, out of sight, and with it disposed of his thoughts of near misses and screwups. No lie.

  Lucas killed the audio from the VCR and substituted another Doors tape. "Love Me Two Times" spun out while 'Gasm jumped and gyrated amid their smoke pots. He thought of the colorful smoke canisters he'd used during the war.

  He recalled Burt Kroeger's loopy theorizing about the administration and the economy. Financial patterns had much to do with Lucas' personal war as well. It had been a mediocre year for the music business, preceded by a bonafide bad year marked by a buying slump. Consumers had hoarded their pennies. Bands were compelled to be more visible, less eccentric. They needed to tour more. Well-organized bands could blitz through three hundred concert dates in a year. This edict meant that Jackson Knox, Electroshock, and 'Gasm were all on the road and, conveniently, all in the West concurrent with Lucas's own liberation. Gabriel Stannard was not touring, but Lucas knew the singer maintained a palatial eyrie in Beverly Hills that was a twenty-minute drive from the Kroeger Concepts building. No rush there.

  Stannard's ears would be pricked following the 'Gasm hit. His guard would be up. Maybe the best procedure would be to make him sweat for a year-two, perhaps-make him hire security guards out the wazoo, bleed him before finishing him off. Make him live in fear. It was already assured that it would be impossible to take out the 'Gasm boys in their hotel. The Hardin job had been a one-shot-only technique.

 
; Security would be tight. Eyes would be open. The plan would have to be seamless. The war was hotting up.

  Lucas touched the VCR remote and scanned backward to Pepper Hartz's solo spot. The band jerked in spastic fast motion; 78 rpm shock treatment. He played the sequence through several more times.

  After locking up the Whip Hand room, he toted the Dragunov out for a bit of practical acid testing in the dark.

  The main room of the cabin was still and quiet. In her sleeping bag, Cass rolled to one side. He heard her breathing in sleep cadence. A tiny trill of desire for her tickled his guts as he stepped out the rear door.

  He was ready for Arizona, and his predawn target practice proved it.

  14

  "DOES THIS SHOT SUCK AS much as I suspect it does?" Logan McCabe growled as he bent to peer into the viewfinder of the big Panavision camera on its dolly. He cut loose a disgusted snort from beneath the visor of his baseball cap. "Yep. It do."

  Gabriel Stannard slouched in the slingback chair embroidered with his name in golden glitter script. Does rock'n'roll suck as much as I suspect it does? he thought to himself. They were even using metal music for beer commercials now.

  David Lee Roth had Geronimo'd out of Van Halen. Eddie and the boys had gone reeling into mediocrity. Now Dangerous Dave was playing it safe, doing Sinatra, doing his ultimate party animal routine, lining up nu-biles to ogle on one of Merv Griffin's sound stages. Dangerous Dave was playing it rich and safe, and he and Stannard didn't swap words much anymore. Time had defanged and neutered Ted Nugent. Sammy Hagar's plug had been pulled by the Springsteen brand of knee-jerk patriotism. Motley Criie had degenerated into a gang of prancing glitter faggots-chicks with dicks, as II Duce, lead revoltoid of the Mentors, had observed on live radio.

  Gabriel Stannard thought about the Mentors for a second.

  The Mentors did puke-rock better than anyone else. Songs like "Clap Queen" and "Golden Shower," catchy little ditties concerning anal rape, venereal disease, pus, and other social issues guaranteed to make the elegantly circle-pinned ladies of the PMRC shit Tiffany cuff links. On your face I leave a shit tower! The Mentors' novelty was exceeded only by their gross-out factor; Dr. Demento would never spin their songs. But if it was inevitable that someone do tunes about herpes sores and killing queers, then II Duce and his rat pack did them better than anyone else, with a gruff metal edge. The only company that would take them on was Brian Slagel's infamous Metal Blade Records, home of the napalm-attack speed metal act Slayer.

  Gabriel Stannard sat watching, half-asleep, thinking bitterly about how bad boys invariably aged badly. His hair was acetylene-torch white and teased out. Lace gloves ran to midbicep. The fingers of the gloves had been sawn off. His top was designer-shredded, and his pants were Spandex. Boots, rags, hankies, all tied in the right places. He had done it a million times. It was comfy and secure. Rock'n'roll was not comfy and secure. When bands grew comfy and secure, you got formulaic, torpor-inducing metal Muzak good for nothing beyond stringing commercials together on the AOR stations. What Stannard craved was a way to stay dangerous.

  He thought he'd found it in a guitarist named Cannibal Rex, formerly of a group called Jonestown Massacre.

  Jonestown had signed to Metal Blade in the wake of Bitch and Lizzy Borden cranking out a relentless brand of thrash guaranteed to make metalheads apoplectic with bliss. It was sticking your head inside a jet turbine to get off on the whine. The hardcore slant had reenergized the familiar patternings of heavy metal-the pro forma sexism, the punk biker look, the lyrics about hell and death and apocalypse. Two of Jonestown's songs, "Black Wedding Dress" and "Hell Wants You!" had even been played on KNAC, a so-called hard rock station that decried the metalzoid label. Stannard didn't care about labels as long as the contents were stimulating. He reevaluated his costume. Ten years ago, it might have been dangerous, different.

  Jonestown Massacre fell apart a week and a half after Stannard's agents had gotten Cannibal Rex's signature on a contract. Cannibal-real name, Martin Killough Beecher-became the new lead man. The PR guys had stamped their hooves and moaned. Cannibal Rex was something they could not sell to the T-shirt-buying fourteen-year-olds in Stannard's constituency.

  Cannibal Rex was bald. The scars on his pate suggested that he shaved his hair with a meat cleaver. He wore the urban punk uniform of Levi's, combat boots, and suspenders and affected a Special Forces green beret with a bullethole through the shield. He had lost the pinky and ring fingers of his picking hand in a gang fight and later had surgery performed to remove the useless hand bones. His right hand was in perfect proportion but only had three digits, rather like Mickey Mouse minus one. He wore one of the smaller finger bones as an earring. His eyes were very red, his pallor nearly blue. His complexion was that of an overdose victim on a morgue slab. He tended to spit on people when he talked. He rarely talked. Thick, murky wraparound shades hid his eyes from the world everywhere except onstage-he liked to glare at audiences, and those eyes were not something you would want paying attention to you for any length of time. His crimson glare was a laser, threatening to drill your heart and make you dead. He had recently begun wearing a combat knife, sheathed to the small of his back, while playing live gigs. He seldom spoke to the band in public, except for Stannard. When he spoke to Stannard, no saliva flew.

  That was all the general public knew of Cannibal Rex.

  "Rex, move on over here. One more time, right?" Logan McCabe pointed to Cannibal's masking-tape mark on the stage floor. They were shooting Stannard's new video on the old Chaplin stage in Hollywood, which was now an adjunct of A&M Records. The set suggested a bombed-out school classroom with a flaming sky visible through shattered windows. Cannibal dutifully moved to his mark, bone earring swinging. There was bullshit, and there was business. This was business.

  What Gabriel Stannard knew about Cannibal Rex was another matter. He knew that Cannibal, as Marty Beecher, had killed two people in self-defense a long time back. Barehanded. He knew that Marty had been invited to enroll at Juilliard. Marty didn't want to study classical guitar, even as a prodigy. Somewhere between the two events, Cannibal Rex was born… and he could chop off two more fingers and still be a more versatile guitarist than most of the guys who made the cover of Musician magazine.

  Logan McCabe had maneuvered into feature films by doing Pimp Killer and Hollywood High Hooker Squad for New World Pictures. Exploitation films for Roger Corman meant a furious production pace and a stranglehold-tight budget. If you were willing to shoot a movie in ten days, years of experience could be had on a shoestring. McCabe was willing and had gotten his chops. Stannard had previewed McCabe's movies on his VCR and requested the director because of the visceral way he handled action scenes. McCabe was not a director of videos, and Stannard had no interest in precision dancers, guest star cameos, or tinsel.

  Neither did Cannibal Rex. Stannard recalled their first alcohol-stoked jam in Stannard's subterranean recording studio. Cannibal shotgunned a beer, blasted a line of good Peruvian snow up each nostril, and manhandled his Les Paul, sawing out a nasty improvised riff. He had repeated it a few more times before getting a vomitous expression on his face. His only comment: "This bites major hose." He bent his pick double and chucked it across the studio. But the riff existed, and like the one Keith Richards had picked out for "Satisfaction," it grew into a song. Stannard and Cannibal punched it back and forth, building and shaping the tune until it was a killer. The title was "Maneater," and it was sure to jump to number one… if they could ever get the damned video in the can. McCabe had tried thirteen takes of Cannibal wailing on his axe and was still dissatisfied. Time was wasting, the union's meter was running, and tempers were fraying on the set.

  The oil smoke used to diffuse the stage lighting was giving Stannard a piledriver headache. All the starch was leaking out of his backbone, and he was sinking into his chair. Sertha appeared at his elbow bearing a glass of Sweetouchnee tea the consistency of Valvoline. It was cut with brown sugar and afloat wit
h lime wedges; Stannard liked to think of the beverage as caffeinated rocket fuel. He crunched five Excedrin dry and drank half the glass.

  "People, the sun. Has gone down. Outside. And here we stand." McCabe shook his head sadly, as if in sympathy at a passing busload of retards. "If this shot had any less juice, it'd be as dry as a nun's punky."

  Sertha shot Stannard a questioning glance.

  He smiled weakly. "Never mind. Another screwed-up American idiomatic expression, signifying boredom." The remark brought some tired chortles from the crew. Stannard knew they were all wearing thin; the gaffers and effects guys had even stopped ogling Sertha He sipped his tea and snaked his free hand between her legs, to wrap around one thigh in a half hug. Ice clinked as he tilted the glass.

  Her calm, contoured, almost Oriental eyes assessed him. "You're doing better today. There's blood in you, life in your eyes."

  "That's from my daily Sertha injection." He polished off the tea, chugging it. "Wooooaahh, speed rush!" He made exploding noises, like a child playing with toy soldiers. "Horus says I've just shifted the focus of my anger. Horus is real big on shifting one's focus."

  Cannibal Rex stood on his mark, shades on, expressionless, a mannequin awaiting the flick of the switch reading detonate.

  "You've stopped worrying, is this what you mean?"

  "Nope. Just that I'm worried more, right now, about the way we're pissing time on this one little piece of film."

  McCabe's assistant director hollered for quiet on the set, and everyone ran through the motions for the ten-second take. One more time.

  'Gasm had a concert date coming up in Tucson, Arizona. Stannard had taken very careful note of their tour schedule. Now he was dealing with his own timetable and observations, not those of the police or the TV news. Rather than sitting at home, gun at hand, wondering when doom was going to drop down on his head, he was beginning to formulate a plan. He was assuming responsibility for his own life, rather than waiting around for others to pick up the slack.