The Five (34 page)

“This has been tough,” Nomad answered. “About Mike and George. I don’t know if you heard, but George is going to be okay.”

“That’s good. You’ve got guts, kid. Keeping on keeping on.
I
wouldn’t be out here, if I was you. I’ll get my little tight ass home.”

“Would you?” Nomad asked, and blew out a long stream of cigarette smoke.

Thor didn’t respond. He just gave a small laugh and shrugged his shoulders and drank some more, and then he said in a lighter tone of voice, “I see you’re still riding with the lesbo, the geek and the hippie.”

“Still am.”

“You fix me up thirty—
fuck
, no—fifteen minutes with that butch babe and I’d leave her blinkin’ and thinkin’.”

“I don’t think that’ll ever happen.” Nomad listened to the Brains bleeding on the stage. He drank his beer and heard all sorts of clams coming out of those widowmakers. “Who’s with you tonight?”

“Guys you don’t know. More fucking kids. But they
can’t
—” and here he balled up his fist and gave Nomad a painful shot to the right arm “—keep up with the sugardaddy. It’s like fucking music kindergarten with those guys behind you. But they’ve got great hair, I’ll say that for ’em.”

“Here’s to great hair,” Nomad said, and lifted his bottle.

“Used to have it, now I buy it,” Thor said. He clinked Nomad’s bottle and drank his beer almost empty. “You want another?”

“No, I’ve still got plenty.”

“Okay.” Again Thor lifted his face toward the sun. After a moment of silence he said, “My dad passed away last December. If you ever emailed or called people who give a shit about you, I would’ve let you know.”

“I’m sorry.” Nomad had heard the stories about Maury ‘The Lighthouse’ Brightman, drawn from the memories of the son who’d tramped along with his father and mother to the hotels and clubs in the fading sunset of the Borscht Belt, the Jewish Alps, otherwise known as the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York. The Lighthouse had played such resorts as Grossinger’s, The Concord, the Friar Tuck Inn, and Kutsher’s Hotel and Country Club. His show had been called “The Boardroom”, in which he sang and did skits in the voices of Tom Jones, Ray Charles, Vic Damone, Al Martino, Jerry Vale, Sammy Davis, Jr., Billy Eckstine and Steve Lawrence, among others, ending of course with Mr. Sinatra the Chairman.

“I bought a black suit, a black tie and a white shirt at Penney’s,” Thor said. “I stood up front and sang ‘My Way’ for my father. Blasted that mother out, made the fucking walls shake. I think he would’ve liked it.”

Nomad nodded. Maury’s gift of vocal prowess to his son was Saul’s ability to speak with no accent at all, or to pull up a dirty drawl in the South or conjure a New England drone or a Midwestern nose-horn or for that matter a British street cockney or a German staccato. His voice was a citizen of the world. All you had to do to hear it was listen to his stage patter, connecting with his audiences like a hometown boy wherever he was, on the
Mjöllnir Circles The Globe
double album released in 1986.

John Charles recalled something this man had said to him once, after sound check in an empty Long Beach club ten years ago:
You want to be like me, kid? Four ex-wives, a taste for the white lady, about sixteen ulcers in my fucking gut and debt up to my ass? You want to be like a fucking nomad wandering the desert? Okay, then, if it means so much to you…and you can take it, which is real doubtful…then you pick up that fucking guitar, you stand up there and sing me something. And you better make it good, because I am not about to let you enter my world if you’re just a fucking slacker.

“Funny,” Thor said after a while, as he looked at the world through his bottle’s amber glass. “A dream I’m having lately.”

Nomad smoked his cigarette down and tapped ashes on the red dirt.

“I can see a woman dancing in a club. All alone. And everything’s dark in there, I can’t make out her face…the color of her hair…nothing. Just occasionally a light passes behind her, so she’s like…outlined. You know.”

“Silhouetted,” Nomad offered.

“Yeah. That. So she’s dancing…slow…like she’s waiting for somebody. The music…it’s not
my
music. Maybe she keeps looking toward the door…expecting somebody to come in, and when they don’t she just keeps dancing, but there’s something about the way her shoulders slump, or the way she brushes her hair back from her face with one hand…that says she’s getting tired of waiting.” Thor angled his face toward the stage, where a particularly bloody B-minor chord had just been launched from the quivering strings. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think I lost my time.”

“Lost your
time
? Get real, man!” Nomad tried to bring up a caustic laugh, but nothing would emerge.

“I’m not talking about the so-called fucking golden days. Can’t remember half of ’em, anyway. I mean that I lost my time to find my soulmate.”

Nomad didn’t know what to say, so he stared silently across the lot at the vans and trailers that continued to pull in. A Fox News truck was among them.

“I’m incomplete, man,” said Thor. “That’s my fucking problem, right there.”

“
Incomplete
? What’ve you been smoking today?”

“Not anything nearly strong enough.” Thor’s eyes had again taken on a deep green shine. “Listen, Johnny. I’m serious. I think this woman in my dream is my soulmate, but I don’t know where she is. I don’t know where to go to find her. And she’s waiting for me, but she doesn’t know she’s waiting, and pretty soon…real soon now…she’s going to give up waiting because it’s been years and years…and I never came to her. Maybe I met her somewhere, but she didn’t have any flash about her, and back then it was all about the flash, and I didn’t see her for what she was so I just brushed her off. Or maybe
I never met her. Maybe it’s not my music she’s dancing to in the dream, because she doesn’t even know me. Never even fucking
heard
of me. But my dream is telling me she’s out there, but the time I spent…the time I lost…it may be too late for me to find her before she just…goes away.”

“Soulmate,” Nomad said, and he took the last draw from his cigarette before it burned his fingers. “I never understood if you’re supposed to…like…instantly know your soulmate, or if this person—saying there
is
a person who fits you like that—grows on you over time, or what. I don’t even know if I believe in that
or not.”

“Oh, I do,” Thor said, his face getting animated. “Absolutely. It’s your Bashert, man. The Zohar talks about it. You know, the Kabbalah. It’s like…when God makes a soul, He creates the male and female together as one, but as it enters this world it like…gets fucking ripped apart. A whole soul is the combination of male and female, those two that got torn away from each other. God Himself is supposed to bring the two halves together again. See?”

“I don’t mean any disrespect for what you believe,” Nomad said, “but I’m not sure that idea’s been working out so well in the last few thousand years.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, but this is how it’s
supposed
to be. I mean…you’re supposed to find your missing half, and when you find it…
if
you find it…you’re not incomplete anymore.”

“So how come God doesn’t put a big neon sign over your soulmate’s head? How come He doesn’t tell you in that dream exactly where she is? Huh?” Nomad didn’t wait for an answer. “That’s kind of cruel, not to let you know something so important. Right?”

Thor heard an element of the music that he liked, and he listened to that for a moment with his head tilted to one side. The sun was radiant in his hair. Then he said, “God is not a nice guy. He’s a hard teacher, Johnny. He’s tough, nothing soft about Him. Oh yeah, He can show mercy. He’s all about mercy. But He’s all about
teaching
, too. He’s the hardest fucking teacher you could ever have. Sometimes you don’t want to hear it, so you turn your back. Sometimes the lessons are pushed right in your face, you can’t turn away. What we call cruel, maybe He calls…necessary, in some way we can’t wrap our minds around because we only know the right here, right now. How come He won’t put a sign over her head in that dream and say, ‘There she is, Saul, there’s your missing half, and go to this exact address and find her and then marry her like you did those four other women and go crazy in the middle of the night and fuck your soulmate up with drugs and bad shit because that’s who you are, Saul, and you would even screw up this thing if I was to let it happen.’”

Thor seemed to catch himself, to hear what he was saying as if some voice other than his had spoken it.

He blinked and looked at his own right hand, and curled the fingers up before his face as if trying to envision it holding something that was not there.

“So,” he said. “‘Here is your lesson, Saul. And it is that I will let you know that there
was
a person meant for you, you alone out of every other person in this world, but you’re so fucked up with yourself that you would destroy even your soulmate. She’s better off walking alone than with you, and I’m not going to help you find her, Saul. I’m going to let you know she’s there somewhere, and she’s getting tired of waiting, and maybe…maybe…if you
do
ever find her by that time maybe…maybe…you will have learned how to be a
man
, you brainless wasteful piece of flesh’.” Thor gave Nomad a startling, ferocious and terrifying grin. “Class
dismissed
.”

Nomad may have made a noise. A quiet murmur, a hiss of breath, whatever. At last, when Thor looked away from him, Nomad dropped his cigarette butt into the beer bottle.

“I guess I’d better go check in,” he said, and he got out from beneath the umbrella and stood up. “Jesus, it
is
hot out here.”

“The deal is,” Thor told him in a quieter voice, “I should’ve found somebody who wanted to help me drive the car.”

Nomad had no idea what that meant, so he waited patiently for the rest of it. God might not be a nice guy and He might not be so patient, but God hadn’t been given his first chance on stage by Thor Bronson, nor had Thor Bronson given God the names of some dudes he knew in Tucson who were looking for a solid lead vocalist/guitar player.

“Every woman I ever found,” Thor said, “wanted to
ride
in the car. Wanted to kick back and let the sugar daddy do it all. And driving that car…it gets mighty fucking hard. Mighty fucking lonely. Yeah, they wanted the money, the clothes, the parties, the drugs, the
glamor
.” That last word had come out like a drool of disgust. “But not one of ’em wanted to help me drive the car. Hey, maybe that’s why I had so many fucking wrecks.” When he looked up at Nomad he was now not so much a lion as a puppy begging for affection.

Nomad smiled. “Maybe.” He was thinking of one wreck in particular, the one with the blue Porsche Targa on the Pacific Coast Highway that had happened years before John Charles had met him, the one that broke both of Saul Brightman’s legs, shattered his jaw and injured his spine, ending his onstage gymnastics and his amazing and fabled leaps from the thundering speakers through walls of pyrotechnic flame. The doctors thought he’d be lucky if he ever again managed to hobble on crutches, but that long-haired Jew from Bayonne, New Jersey…he was one tough
shtarker
.

“The one who wants to help you drive the car,” Thor said. “Maybe she’s the soulmate, maybe not…but she’s definitely the keeper.” He reached out to rub his scarred kneecaps, which felt so much better in the heat of the sun. “Having a party after our gig. Fun to be had by all. Bring your condoms and your fucking youth.”

“We’re pulling out after we play,” Nomad replied. “Hitting the Casbah in San Diego tomorrow night.”

“Okay, yeah, I saw that on your website. Hey, how about checking out
my
site? And before you pull out, let’s exchange email addresses. Of course, I’m not up in your range anymore, fuckers like you getting eight hundred smacks for ninety minutes on an
afternoon
gig. Yeah, everybody knows about that, man, so don’t try to look dumb, and don’t shrug like a gutless motherfucker either. You’re either worth it or you’re not, and you’ve got to
believe
you’re worth it to
be
worth it. Anyway, you guys have been chosen by somebody up in the penthouse, some Jew
momzer
smoking a big Cuban and looking for his next meal ticket. So go and enjoy it and work like a sonofabitch and don’t fuck it up, and what is there left to say?”

“I guess that says it all.” But Nomad knew it didn’t. He knew he should say
this is our last
ride
or
we’re ending it after Austin
or
I’m going to hunker down for a while and figure out what to
do next,
but then Thor would’ve gotten up on his wiry legs and scarred knees and blasted him with Norse fire and the statement
Don’t give me that, Johnny, because you know just like I do that the
show must go on
.

To which Nomad would’ve answered with a question:
But does it have to go on and on
and on and on?

Thor stood up. He and Nomad exchanged high-fives, bumped fists and shoulders and then, running out of affectations, they hugged each other.

“Think about me out there, kid,” Thor said.

How could it be otherwise? How could Nomad go onstage and
not
think about Thor Bronson and the long shadows of the road warriors who had gone before?

“Catch you later,” Nomad told him, and he walked toward the hospitality trailer. Before he got there, he looked back over his shoulder and saw Saul Brightman, the dutiful son of a great and loving father, sitting in his lawn chair again with his legs outstretched, like any middle-aged fan at an outdoor concert. Nomad saw him give a fist pump, at some part of the music that he thought particularly deserving.

Then Nomad turned his face away, and he went on.

NINETEEN.

You guys ready for your intro?” asked the skull-faced clown in the red Stone Church 9 T-shirt, the sparkly green shorts, cowboy boots and black tophat. The curls of his orange fright-wig boiled out from under the hat. He wore a red nose with a blinking light powered by the battery pack at his waist.

“Ready,” Nomad said, speaking for them all.

The clown, whose handle at this gig was Eezy Duzit, headed out onto the stage through a corridor lined with black curtains. A chorus of whistles and a roar of anticipation went up from the audience, which Nomad hadn’t seen yet. The clown had said he estimated about eight or nine hundred people were out there, and more would be coming in from the ‘Midway’ as their show went on. There were no seats; the audience brought their own or stood up, and the front half of the place was a mosh pit where people danced or thrashed or fought as they pleased. However many there were, they sounded hungry.

As Eezy Duzit went to one of the mike stands, a ragged chant started up and gained both strength and volume:
The Five…The
Five…The Five…The Five…

“Are they saying ‘You Die’?” Berke asked.

In the space between Duzit picking up his mike and the chant quieting down, somebody out in the midst of the crowd shouted, very clearly, “The Five fuckin’ sucks!” which brought a storm of laughter and more wicked shouts and catcalls concerning The Five’s abilities to suck donkeymeat, eat shit and take cocks up their collective ass.

Nomad turned around and looked into the faces of his friends. On Terry’s scalp and chipmunk cheeks shone an oily sheen of sweat, his eyes huge and frightened behind his Lennon specs. Ariel’s mouth was a grim line, her face pale but her eyes the dark gray of a stormy sea. Though Berke wore a faintly bemused expression, her eyes were dead black and her hands were on her hips in an attitude of somebody ready to kick dogturds off the sidewalk.

Nomad was the emperor. He had to say something in this moment of heat and pressure. He had time for only three words, spoken in a whiskied rasp that even Thor Bronson would have admired: “Tear them up.”

“You’ve heard about ’em!” Eezy Duzit’s amplified voice came out of the huge speaker stacks capable of sixty thousand watts of mind-blowing power. The voice hit rock and came echoing back. “You’ve seen ’em on TV! Welcome to the Stone Church stage, from Austin, Texas, the band that will not die….The Five!”

As a raucous and not altogether sober cheer went up, Berke pulled in a deep breath, squared her shoulders and walked out through the corridor. Nomad stared into Ariel’s face, and she into his. They were following a short set by the Cannibal Cult, whose Asian female lead singer Kitty Kones had, at a breakthroat tempo, screamed songs into the Electrovoice that seemed to be the Korean language mixed with a shrill outpouring of English profanity, as far as Nomad could tell. Whatever she was saying, the crowd had responded with basso woofs and the kind of noise that could bend metal. Her response to their response was to throw her microphone on the stage in the middle of Cannibal Cult’s fifth song and storm off, teeth bared in her white-powdered face.

The stage crew had come on to clear away Cannibal Cult’s mess and set up for The Five. While the band got themselves ready in whatever way they needed to, the crew swarmed the stage to move the Cult’s drumkit off and bring in The Five’s, set up the keyboards, plug everything in, check the sound levels and the stage monitors, and generally get the transition from band to band done as smoothly and quickly as possible.

As Nomad had been waiting for the crew to finish, he’d thought of an incident that had happened in the hospitality trailer just after he’d left Thor. He’d gone into the trailer’s air-conditioned chill and walked between the chow tables set up with pre-packaged sandwiches, chips, fruit, candy bars, soft drinks and the like. His available choices of sandwich had been chicken covered with melted American cheese, turkey with melted provolone cheese, ham and melted Swiss, and some kind of pimento cheese nightmare. Pizzas were on display, all layered with his throat-closing favorite. But when he’d gone to the check-in table to get his stage pass, the very nice older lady on duty had looked at the green mark next to his name and said, “I see you get a special lunch. Are you allergic to dairy?”

“I am, yeah.”

“I’ve got a couple of sandwiches without cheese set aside for you.”

“Oh…okay. Well, that’s great. Um…how did you know?”

“Your manager told us,” she’d said.

Nomad remembered saying to Truitt Allen at the hospital:
I’m allergic to cheese
.

Where was he, anyway? There’d been no sign of him since he’d unlocked the trailer and they’d taken the gear out, over an hour ago. He hadn’t even walked them to the stage.

Some manager
he
was.

Over the surly noise of the crowd, Berke started her drum intro to ‘Bedlam A-Go-Go’. It was a snap of snare, a flurry of toms and a bright hiss of cymbals. Then on the bass she pounded a beat that was nearly double what they’d done on the original song, from their first CD.

It was time to get it done. Nomad nodded at Ariel, who walked out along the corridor; he clapped Terry on the shoulder and Terry walked out, and then Nomad got in step right behind him.

The light was a harsh white glare. A dry wind blew into their faces. Above them, a huge canopy of black cloth flapped and twisted. The crowd hollered again, and surged forward against the waist-high chainlink fence that stood about twenty feet from the stage. Uniformed GB Promotions security guards were waving them back, while between the chainlink and the stage, photographers were snapping pictures and news teams were aiming their video cameras.

The band that will not die
, Nomad thought as he crossed the stage to his position and picked up his Strat from its stand.

He kinda liked that.

Terry slid behind his Hammond, with the Roland on his left and a rack of effects boxes on his right. He turned up the Fuzz and Distortion settings to their max. On the other side of the stage, Ariel stood in front of her mike and picked up her Tempest. She adjusted for tone. Without looking at the audience she hit the song’s first howling chords—B-flat, D-minor, G—which brought Nomad in to repeat them and add an F chord to the structure. Terry came in with an ear-piercing little stab of notes, and then Nomad got his mouth up to the microphone and half-sang, half-shouted the words as Berke drove the drums into a frenetic, warped disco beat.

“In my dream I had a third eye.

My dog and I we liked to fly

High above the wasted earth,

High above the dirty surf.

We saw a city burning red.

We heard some voices

And what they said,

Come join us it’s party time,

Come join us the party’s fine.

Come on down we never close,

Come on down enjoy the show.

We live it, we love it

But we never can rise above it.

Bedlam A-Go-Go.

We live here, we love it.

The kings and queens of nowhere scenes,

In Bedlam, Bedlam A-Go-Go.”

Nomad looked out across the audience as Terry launched into a short instrumental strut—a demonic boogaloo—between the choruses. He saw the oval shape of the natural amphitheater, which was about the size of two football fields. A control tower stood at its center, topped with a glassed-in booth and bristling with multicolored parcans, follow spots, strobes and other special effects lights. Back and to the left were the turnstiles of the entrance area, and beyond it the ‘Midway’, where vendors from all over the southwest and California had come to display their artistry.

Business was booming among this demographic. He saw blue, red and purple flames tattooed on bald heads. He saw faces transformed into Escher artwork. He saw the calligraphy of a hundred hues written across shoulders and chests and breasts and stomachs, each man and woman their own Book of Life. Here, dancing and capering, was a bearded figure whose original color of birthflesh had disappeared beneath the new skin of blue ink and black proclamations; there whirling ’round and ’round was a topless female with red pigtails and an intricate painting of a multicolored dragon clinging to her back, its arms extending down across her shoulders and the black nails of its claws circling her nipples. Technicolor serpents coiled around throats, arms, thighs and calves. Flowers grew from navels and foreheads were crowned by shooting stars and pentagrams. Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Chaplin, Alice Cooper and Hitler pushed their faces forth from sweat-glistening meat. And there in the crowd…and there…and over there…stood in this blur of constant motion the few motionless figures who stood staring at the performers on the stage with eyes in a visage no longer recognizable as being earthly; they were creations from another realm, a strange and frightening beauty of human matter carved upon and recolored by needles both insane and awesome. There was the face made of layered scales like the gray hide of a desert lizard; there was the face created from a dozen interlocking other faces like a grotesque human jigsaw puzzle; and there was the face that was none at all, but rather a pair of eyes, nostrils and a mouth suspended against a bruise-colored, crackled parchment of indecipherable markings. It seemed to Nomad to be a document of rage.

He almost missed his cue. The disco beat became nearly a slippery-slidey rap, echoed back to him as if the mountain itself had a voice:

“Bedlam A-Go-Go!

Two wrongs, they make a right.

Peacekeepers, they want to fight.
”

The song had been their first video. The Five had danced down a Soul Train of demons and angels. A UT computer graphics major had digitized James Brown dancing down the line, followed by, among other public figures, George W. Bush, Bill Gates, Saddam Hussein, Mother Teresa, Oprah Winfrey, a black-and-white leering Satan from an old movie called ‘Dante’s Inferno’, Godzilla and John Barrymore’s hunchbacked Mr. Hyde from the silent film. The video had been up for two days on YouTube before the plug was pulled, in a big way.

“
Vampires, they sleep at night.

My straitjacket, it’s way too tight!

Bedlam A-Go-Go!

Mad mister murder he came to play,

Brought a butcher knife and he carved away.

The homeless sit on barren fields

While the bankers sit on their golden steals.

President says to embrace that fear,

But he’s on the first plane out of here.

Bedlam A-Go-Go-Go!
”

At the end of the song, sweaty and energized, Nomad stood at the edge of the stage as he took in the response, so far so good, and he shouted into his mike a statement for that other Gogo, the Felix, over in Dallas or Fort Worth or Temple or Waco or wherever he was today, selling his cars and grinning his grins: “
Fuck
your role!”

Which got, really, a stronger response than the song had.

By the end of the third song, the Terry-penned ‘Don’t Bleed On My Paisley Shirt’, Ariel was dropping chords and lagging behind the beat. Her concentration was out of the groove and it wasn’t just because of the speed and intensity. Those she could handle; it was the feeling here that was eating at her. It was the atmosphere of Stone Church itself, a hard steely dark sense of…what was it? Hatred? Contempt? She was out of her element here, she felt vulnerable and threatened. She felt, quite simply, like an easy target. She’d realized, as well, that the stage’s backdrop and wings were painted to look like mortar lines and red stones.

Everybody else was going full-throttle. Occasionally she would get a questioning glance from John or Terry, a lift of the eyebrows to urge her to tighten up, but her nerves were betraying her talent. As the show went on and the hot wind blew around the folds of the black canopy above their heads and more and more bodies came through those turnstiles and ran to join the slam-dancing, bone-smashing tribe, Ariel felt herself falling away from her friends.

It had bothered her so much, since that visit to George in the ICU. Day or night, bright or dark, she couldn’t shake it.

It was up there
, George had said.
Folded up. Sharp edges
.
The wings of a crow
.

< >

Waiting for him to die, he’d told them
.

And then…the appearance of that girl.

I believe in you, George
.

I thought she was the angel of death
, he’d said.

But now I think she was the angel of life
.

Ariel dropped another chord and stumbled over a trill in the first chorus of ‘Your Body Not Your Soul’, which really earned her a puzzled look from John Charles. She had a solo coming up at the bridge of this song, she had to focus, but…why had George seen that girl from the well in his hospital room? Of all people he might have dreamed of seeing? Of all the people he had ever met?

Why her?

And that thing about driving back and finding out if the place would still be there…why
wouldn’t
it be there? It was there, they saw it, why wouldn’t it be there?

Don’t you want my part
? George had asked.