Authors: Brenna Yovanoff
The Replacement (15 page)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
APPLAUSE
T
hat night, Roswell came to get me and didn't ask questions. I half wanted him to ask why I had my bass with me, but he didn't. We listened to the radio. All the songs were about true love and drug addiction.
hat night, Roswell came to get me and didn't ask questions. I half wanted him to ask why I had my bass with me, but he didn't. We listened to the radio. All the songs were about true love and drug addiction.
When we pulled up at the Starlight, no one from Rasputin was there yet. Roswell and I stood in the middle of the floor and watched the crowd. A lot of people were in costumes, even though Halloween was still two days away. They moved easily through the Starlight, staring past me, and I wondered what they saw when they looked in my direction. Not a god or a monster. Maybe no one.
Then I heard a high, shrieking laugh and turned in time to see Alice. She was wearing her cat costume again, but this time she had a rhinestone collar around her neck and her whiskers were purple. She was walking with a guy named Levi Anderson, hanging on him as they came toward us. When they were almost even with me, she gave me a spiteful look, then plastered herself against Levi.
"Classy girl," Roswell said under his breath, but I didn't feel hurt or angry. My heart was starting to race and I didn't feel anything.
I found us an empty booth in the corner and sat staring at my hands while Roswell went up to the bar for something to drink.
"Are you okay?" he said when he slid into the seat across from me. He had a paper cup of Mountain Dew in his hand. "'Cause you kind of look like hell."
I nodded and stared down at the table. There were cigarette burns all over it.
"What's wrong?" he said.
"Do you ever think about the secret stuff in Gentry, the ugly things? Like, what it means when kids . . . when they die?"
He looked at me a long time before he answered, turning the cup so the ice clattered and cracked and the Mountain Dew splashed in circles, antifreeze colored. "I think that people are complicated and everybody's got their share of secrets."
I nodded and wondered why he wasn't pushing the conversation. Why he wasn't asking questions. I wanted him to make me say the things that wouldn't come out in words unless I couldn't avoid them. If he asked the right questions, I'd have to tell him. But he didn't say anything.
Across the dance floor, Carlina Carlyle was standing by the soundboard. When she saw me looking, she opened her eyes wide and waved me over.
Her hair was piled on top of her head. She looked strange and fantastical and startling and normal.
I stood up, reaching for my bass. "I have to go," I told Roswell.
"Go where?"
"Go work for them, play for them. Something. I'm in it now, and I don't think I can get out. I don't know what to do."
He just shrugged and nodded toward the stage. "So, go up there and do something amazing."
Carlina led me back through a narrow hall and into a tiny dressing room, more like a closet than a room. There was a gouged wooden dresser and a chair and nothing else. Everything smelled like dust.
I stood in the middle of the room with my heart racing. "Is this all you really need to survive? I mean, is there something I'm supposed to do to make the music work?"
Carlina was rifling through the dresser. She closed a drawer and turned to face me, shaking her head. "It's a living." Her voice sounded flat. "Gentry doesn't always remember that we're here, but they remember that they like a good performance. Everyone loves a good performance." She tossed a bundle of clothes at me. "Put these on."
I picked through them. Black wool slacks and a white button-down shirt, the blinding-black shoes, the suspenders. The fact remained, I wasn't really her bassist. I was quiet and skinny and sixteen years old and I got a tight, nervous feeling in my stomach if I was called on to answer in class.
Carlina sighed and turned her back. "Just hurry up and put them on."
I started stripping off my clothes. I yanked the slacks up, buttoned the shirt. I tried to figure out the clasps on the suspenders, but my hands were shaking.
"Here." Carlina took the clasp from me and opened it. "You need to relax."
When I was dressed, she sat me down at the little wooden dresser and reached for a comb. She started raking my hair back from my face, slicking it down with some kind of pomade that smelled like mint and honey and wax. Her hands felt cool on my forehead, like something was seeping over me.
I leaned sideways, trying to see myself in the dresser mirror. "Are you making me look like someone else?"
"No, you'll still look like you, but not so much that anyone down there would recognize you, if you know what I mean. To most people, even Luther doesn't look like Luther, and I don't look like myself." She touched the comb's teeth, greasing the tips of her fingers, twisting a lock of hair in front so it hung down over my forehead. "It's not a spell or a trick, nothing
changes
. They just see what they want to."
changes
. They just see what they want to."
I looked down at my gleaming shoes and when I glanced in the mirror again, I recognized myself, and I didn't. I'd been getting used to how I could look like a whole new person when my eyes were dark brown and my color was good, but this was different. My expression was too far away, like I was looking into the mirror, but someone else was looking back. I was seeing what I wanted to see because what I wanted was to be someone besides myself. The visual wasn't comforting, though. The person in the mirror looked tired and hopeless.
Carlina put the comb down and turned me away from the mirror. She held my face between her hands, smiling her strange, sad smile.
"So we just give them some kind of distraction," I said. "Another lie."
She closed her eyes and pressed her forehead against mine. "No, what we're giving them is the unvarnished truth. They just don't know it. When you go out onstage, you'll be closer to yourself than you've ever been, and that's a beautiful thing. It's what they paid to see."
But that didn't make me feel better. My hands were shaking and my mouth felt dry. "I just feel nervous, though. I feel weird and freakish and pointless, and nobody wants to see that. I can't be what they paid for."
"Then you have to feel like that, then let it go and do your job." She whispered it, and I could feel her breath on the bridge of my nose. "We'll go out onto the stage in a minute, and when we do, you have to make them believe that whatever you show them is the real you because sometimes being believed in is just what it means not to die."
But I'd been waiting to die my whole life. I'd spent years expecting it any day because that was just what happened. Going onstage was different. Out onstage, the Starlight would be dark, with the spotlight shining down and no place else to look, and that was something I couldn't just live with and couldn't wish away. Being seen was the worst thing that could happen to someone like me.
"I just--I've never played in front of anyone before."
Carlina nodded against my forehead. "They'll love you, though, just like they love us. Do you want me to announce you as a special guest?"
"No, just let me come on with you guys like I belong there."
She let me go, then stood looking down at me. "You do."
As soon as the curtain came up, the noise of the crowd was deafening. The footlights glared in my face, and beyond that, there was nothing but a sea of voices and long, shrill whistles.
The drummer and I were supposed to set the tempo, but Luther was the one who stepped into the intro like he owned it, like it was
his
song--fast and frantic and I knew it in my fingers, even when I didn't know it by ear or from memory. Earlier, Luther had laughed when I asked to see the set list, but now I understood that set lists were meaningless. They just played whatever they felt like playing.
his
song--fast and frantic and I knew it in my fingers, even when I didn't know it by ear or from memory. Earlier, Luther had laughed when I asked to see the set list, but now I understood that set lists were meaningless. They just played whatever they felt like playing.
Luther grinned, watching my face, leading me through each verse and chorus, making me race him. I listened to his changes and found the counterpoint, making every note rumble and screech because the song was about mayhem and being totally, arrogantly out of control.
Adrenaline was coursing through my fingers, tingling in my blood. This was what it felt like to be a rock star.
As soon as I came to the end of the song, though, the feeling stuttered, then disappeared. I let the guitar hang heavy against the strap and my hands felt cold and shaky again. Suddenly, I was very aware that I was standing on a stage in front of two hundred people, and all I had was a cherry-red Gibson reissue and someone else's shoes.
Luther just swung his guitar around in an arc, sneering down at everyone in the audience. Then he went straight into "Common People," not caring that it was supposed to have a synthesizer or that it was about thirty years old and most of the kids in the Starlight had never even heard of Pulp. He just picked it and played it, making the guitar sing in his hands, while Carlina acted both sides of a conversation between a rich girl and a working-class guy and screamed herself hoarse about all the ways that being poor sucked.
Every now and then, Luther cut his eyes at me and I tried to read the cues in his glances. He picked the tune faster, showing me how
every
song was a conversation, a debate between rhythms and tones. I just had to listen and then respond.
every
song was a conversation, a debate between rhythms and tones. I just had to listen and then respond.
We played in tandem, working off each other, until he switched into an old Pearl Jam song. It was "Yellow Ledbetter."
The bass line was low and inevitable. I hit the first note and the whole building seemed to creak and shudder.
It was a song about loss, but the melody was sweet, and if Eddie Vedder sounded kind of like a stumbling wino in his version, Carlina sounded husky but clear.
Her voice was like loneliness. It was regret. She sang about a past you couldn't get out of and didn't want, and standing alone in the cool blue light, she was beautiful--more beautiful than the shows where she wailed and pranced, strutting back and forth across the stage, far more beautiful than she'd been standing over me on the church lawn. With her hands cupped around the microphone, she was the realest part of the Starlight, the realest voice in Gentry. Luther and I supplied the melody, but all the notes were leading up to her. She was the purest, biggest truth, while all the audience were just kids wearing their costumes.
She wailed the first chorus with her chin up and her back straight. Then she brought the mic close, smiling over at Luther. "Now, make me cry."
Luther smiled back. Not his sly, toothy grin, but a real one, open and honest. He bent over the guitar and played a solo that was just for her--a slow progression of notes, running hard and sharp and up.
I followed it, making my own melody thump and buzz underneath his like a heartbeat, letting each note hang for minutes or years. And then something happened.
It wasn't like the other songs. There was no story, no conversation. This was just the feeling, without words or pictures, and it had nothing to do with Luther or his clean, stinging guitar.
It was the sound of being outside, of being alien. It was the pulse that ran under everything and never let you forget that you were strange, that the world hurt just to touch. Feelings too complicated to ever say in words, but they spilled out of the amplifiers, seeping into the air and filling up the room.
Out in the crowd, everyone had stopped moving. They stood in the pit, staring up at me, and when I stopped playing, they started to clap.
"Mackie," Carlina said, coming close to whisper in my ear. "You can't
do
that."
do
that."
"They liked it, though."
She nodded, touching the collar of her dress. "It's just--it's not good for them to feel it for very long. It's exhausting, feeling like that."
Down in the pit, the clapping had already started to die. People were staring up at the stage and the colored lights. Luther went into a frantic version of "Here Comes Your Man" that sounded like a three-day coke bender, and they stood around like dairy cows.
When the Pixies didn't get a reaction, he pulled out Nick Cave and then Nine Inch Nails, but nothing seemed to get them moving again. He played one last hard, flashy change, then quit torturing "Mr. Self-Destruct" in the middle of the riff.
Behind us, the drummer gave the snare a few more halfhearted beats, and then he stopped too and got up. The four of us stood motionless on the stage and I had just fucked up the special surprise Halloween show, and royally.
Luther shot Carlina a desperate look and jerked his head toward the wings. "We have to bring out the piano."
She shook her head.
"Do it--play them one of those sad-bastard ballads and finish us up. It's all they'll want now anyway."
"Fine," she said in the long silence. "Fine, bring it out."
Luther and the drummer dragged an old upright piano out of the wings and pushed it into the center of the stage. The finish was wearing off the wood in pale stripes.
Carlina tossed her hair back over one shoulder and settled onto the bench. She raised her hands and spread her fingers over the keys. Then she found the first chord.
It was a Leonard Cohen song. I knew it but had never known it like this. It wasn't bitter or cynical. It was broken.
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