Outsider (14 page)

They would hunt on the same gigs with no
objections from Toni, as long as they wanted different preys. The
only time they clashed, Joy bowed down. Her elder was not into
sharing. Joy noticed that when the Fireheads were due on stage,
Toni had already fed.

She witnessed Toni’s obsessive love for the
grey-eyed lead guitar of the Fireheads grow and grow.

When the musician eventually noticed the
scarecrow, she stared at her long and hard. Because Toni was the
almost perfect doppelganger of her guitar hero, the totally
androgynous front person of the seventies’ U. S. iconic rock band
Hell For Leather.

Joy witnessed Toni weaving a friendship with
the musician named Dee-Dee without the use of any mesmerising
power. She witnessed Toni giving the musician a one and only
present: a customised electric guitar that Toni had made herself
and played back in her seventies’ glorious hay-days. And Dee-Dee
knew, from spending many nights on the unofficial Hell For Leather
websites, that this was The Guitar of her Hero. Or an uncannily
good copy? No, impossible. But how could Toni have come across such
a genuine article?

Joy witnessed the friendship take a romantic
turn. She witnessed Toni’s growing impatience and the subsequent
mistake. Toni made Dee-Dee into a vampire, against the musician’s
will, and got rewarded with the new vampire’s hate and immediate
disappearance.

In her hour of distress the ancient vampire
who was actually not so ancient, only a couple of centuries and a
few years old, turned to Joy. Their acquaintance took a very
bizarre turn. Very bizarre in Joy’s eyes. She found herself
grudgingly sharing her old-fashioned coffin with a distraught and
suddenly needy Toni. Joy would go out and hunt every night. Back to
her lair before dawn, she would let the recluse Toni bite the
tender skin over her jugular and feed in her embrace. Night after
night after night.

Given the choice, she would have never let
any vampire feed upon her, but she felt so attracted to Toni that
she could only comply, never mind the passivity of the role, never
mind that Toni could have just drained her, destroyed her,
mercilessly.

Joy felt compassion, and even more, for her
distraught kin. She found herself really liking Toni. One night,
regaining her lair, she discovered the attractive scarecrow had
left. Gone. It was like she had never ever been there, never lay in
the narrow coffin, never curled up in Joy’s arms, never kissed and
bitten Joy’s neck, never cried tears of blood in Joy’s black and
white hair.

She felt a sudden emptiness, a sudden
despondency clawing at the heart she didn’t really have.
Loneliness. Tears came to her eyes but she didn’t cry. She
understood Toni somehow. Toni had felt lonely, and at times
unbearably lonely. So lonely that when she had so deeply fallen for
the Firehead musician, she had let impatience get the best of her.
And she had lost. Something was now bitterly amiss in Joy’s
existence.

* * * * * * *

Was it why she was now remembering the one
person she had wanted to forget. Her attraction to Toni then had
been as strong as her attraction for Sid now.

INTERLUDE
(By courtesy of the
author Sid Wasgo)

ODE TO DEATH

A glimpse at a time you had given me

Coming so close but staying so far

A shadow on the horizon, silhouette on the
background

I wanted you with a passion

But you kept saying NO

I desired you with the might of my youth

But you kept sidestepping

Denying me your embrace

Your door was closed to me

Deaf to my anxious knocking

Years riddled my soul

I know you’re standing by

I can feel your presence

I am waiting for your coming

For the light touch of your loving

I am waiting for you

Not dancing for once, standing on the edge of
the crowded official dance floor, just next to the pony-tailed
woman selling the band’s paraphernalia, but watching the enthralled
audience totally overcome by the powerful voice of the charismatic
singer. It was not a song Sid liked but, nonetheless, the number
was working wonders with the enthusiastic masses. It was what they
wanted to hear. Second Look was a rock band tailoring lyrics
especially for their groupies, regardless of the performers’
private lives. It was the secret of their success, and Sid
understood it. If she studied the band’s inner workings it was to
understand where she had failed. No, it was not failure, it was a
different choice. Sid had chosen to write the songs she wanted to
hear, unaware of how much of a minority she was. Despite her
personal peculiarities, she had tasted power, as much as Terri the
other brown-eyed singer now owned. And Sid would never forget how
easy it had been. She admired the band. She admired Terri for her
voice, her strength, her confidence. She more than admired Dawn the
grey-eyed keyboard player for her talent, her quietness and her
passion for music. And didn’t mind giving up her own stumbling
performing career. Something Second Look had unknowingly taught
Sid: never deny yourself who you are, or who you were, always
remember and be proud, no matter your next choice. And Sid
remembered, she had tasted power, too, and it had felt good.

It had been one of these little ironies Life
dealt with such expertise. At the time, five years back, Sid used
to haunt a local dive on a weekly basis for a so-called acoustic
night where she’d play her electric guitar. The MC, himself a rock
singer showcasing his own band, had required from performers to do
only love songs for the forthcoming Valentine’s Day. An alcoholic
singer, who was quite fond of Sid’s iconoclastic tunes, commented:
“Of course, you don’t have any!” It slightly irritated her. It felt
like a challenge. Did she need love songs? No. They were too easy.
Let’s have a holiday then. As it turned out, no one bothered
following the request. But Sid. She chose one of her own: “And The
Stars And The Moons”. She chose her favourite by Melissa Etheridge:
“You Can Sleep While I Drive”. And she finally chose one of her
ancient and dusty numbers: “I Won’t Be The One”. Because she knew
she was the best for love songs anyway. Nothing to brag about. It
was so easy peasy. No challenge. But there was one thing she didn’t
know, one thing she would have never expected because she was so
used to people labelling her hard-core punk and heavy metal. She
sang as she always did, with her soul and her heart, with her might
and her voice. And the audience stood up. Silent, transfixed,
bespelled. She had them in the palm of her hand. She owned them. It
was power. But not power to take, manipulate, control and twist. It
was power at its best. It was real power. It was love.

The name of Doris Day broke into her
daydreaming. She grimaced. Please, Terri, not again. But Terri was
hell-bent into ending the night with a few corny tunes and Dawn was
up for it, too. Sid was not quite sure how it was going to affect
her. Two weeks ago she had started reducing her daily dose of
antidepressants and she was already feeling more sensitive to her
surroundings and the events in her surroundings.

In the middle of Terri’s enthusiastic
introduction, Dawn squeezed in that Doris Day loved animals and
Terri added that Doris was the mother of s/m. Sid briefly wondered
if the “Que Sera, Sera” singer was still alive. Terri kept on
talking. About this new friend of hers living near by, who had
promised to lend her, her personal whip if she would sing some
specific tune whose title the writer didn’t catch in the general
din. Terri’s new friend, a leather-clad woman (or was it rubber?),
stood up and handed over the aforementioned item. The crowd was
already in stitches. Sid felt uncomfortable. She didn’t like the
look of the whip. Terri, showing the phallus-shaped handle,
declared to the audience:

“I don’t know what to do with that!”

More peals of laughter. Sid was not sure if
the humour had vaguely caught up with her or if her vague smile was
a nervous twitch. Then Terri pretended the handle of the whip was
the microphone and Dawn really started hitting the keys. Was the
audience laughing because it was really funny, or was it because
Terri was greatly charismatic? Sid wondered, but didn’t laugh.

Terri was singing, generously whirling the
black whip over her head, totally unaware of Dawn’s behaviour. Dawn
was rather weary about the length of leather lashing about. She was
leaning as far as possible as playing the keyboards permitted,
wondering if she could avoid the threatening lashes forever. To the
patrons’ great delight.

Suddenly, Dawn stopped playing, removed
Terri’s mic stand to the confines of the opposite end of the stage,
grabbed the shoulders of the bewildered singer now silent but still
open-mouthed, moved her to the same direction, and went back to her
keyboard-playing.

Terri, still miles from understanding the
musician’s utterly baffling behaviour, tried to move her mic stand
back to the middle of the stage. But Dawn rushed to intervene
again, the audience enjoying the unplanned vaudeville.
Unfortunately for Sid, the vaudeville was only starting, even if
they never finished this song, and it left her with open-ended
thoughts about s/m rushing and screaming all through her mind. She
just didn’t know what her position was on the subject. She only
knew her lack of comfort. While Second Look engulfed into their
next Doris Day cover, some punters engaged in a bout of dirty
dancing.

“Get them off the floor!” Shouted Terri in
between lyrics, but no one paid heed to her words, amalgamating
them with her collection of saucy puns.

And the dancers, a man and a woman, who had
never met before, but were both familiar with fetish clubs, kept on
dancing close and drunkenly, hands following the rhythm to body
parts Sid wouldn’t dream of touching in the middle of a public
place. By the end of the song, the two dancers were on the floor,
the woman on top of the man, and kissed with a hint of passion,
despite their different sexual inclinations.

Terri, bemused, couldn’t help laughing.

“Dawn, have you seen that?”

But Dawn had been playing her keyboards, as
oblivious to the world as music always got her. And Sid felt hate
for the world, and confusion. The confusion, so ever-present in her
life, the confusion that bruised her emotions, pushed her from one
end of the spectrum to the next, jostled her from one thought to
the next, how am I supposed to behave, the Olympic gold medal and
greatest favourite of the competition. If she hadn’t been standing
frozen cold on the side of the dance floor, she would have
puked.

Thankfully, Sid didn’t spend her days
thinking about every little detail of the Second Look’s gigs.
Besides, she had better to do, in her characteristically disorderly
ways, than tossing Doris Day round and round her mind. She was more
into losing herself into the memory of her encounter with Death,
over and over again. To the point that she could hardly think about
anything else, hardly dream about her favourite keyboard player,
let alone remember to take the reduced dose of the prescribed
drugs. What was the point of enhancing her natural mania when all
she wanted was Death herself? What was it that the copper-skinned
woman had told her: she’d have to put up with the side effects of
her SSRi a while longer? Well, no thanx, Darling. The music could
go on but there were things she was not willing to put up with.

The memory of this extraordinary meeting felt
surreal. Sid was getting to wonder if it had really happened. Or
maybe it was just hallucinations, courtesy of the bloody
anti-depressants. Ha ha, anti-depressants, what a joke. Only one
thing would ever soothe the pain inside. It was not a thing, it was
not human either, it was Death herself.

So, the hell with rumours, even if creating
rumours had a fun side to it, the only one Sid had the hots for was
Death, again and again Death, Death who knew how to please her,
Death and her pocket computer, Death and her Native American looks,
Death who probably was too busy to care.

Drat, the effects of the drugs were really
fading away now. Gone the manic talent, gone the attractive shine
of her aura. The rock singer had just about said hi at the latest
gig and Joy the vampire, if she was a vampire, if she was really
named Joy, hadn’t appeared.

Sid felt confused. She was losing touch with
reality, losing her ground, doubting. Maybe if was just a fantasy.
Maybe vampires didn’t exist, and thus couldn’t offer death on a
silver tray. Or maybe she didn’t want to die after all; and her
belief in suicidal tendencies and immortality were delusions. She
remembered writing in her diary:
The people who kill themselves
are the ones who want a life so badly but cannot take anything for
granted anymore.

But Death……. Hang on a sec. Maybe, just
maybe, there was a way. If Sid could talk to Joy and convince her
to stage a “scene”, would Death turn up and call their bluff?

Another gig came and went. Sid was still
focused on the elusive and extraordinary keyboard player while the
rock singer oscillated like a wild pendulum between tequila and
Chardonnay. Sid had recycled one of these things hanging from cats’
collars into an earring. Unscrewed, the device would reveal a tiny
strip of paper rolled tightly. On it, Sid had written:
If found,
call Death, she’ll know what to do with Sid.

Sleep started to elude her, hinting at a
different kind of mania, a mild strain of insanity.

* * * * * * *

It was the Black Crow again. Joy was wearing
one of her usual little black numbers. It suited her hair cascading
down her back like a night waterfall. It suited her long legs
sheathed in knee-high boots. She was scanning the packed venue for
a potential prey. She could certainly feed without leaving trails
of bloodless corpses for the cops to decipher, but the kill was a
thrill. And Second Look’s fans were always such tasty morsels.