USABLE FUDGE - a glampunk story
Chapter One: Coverboy Shoplift
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CHAPTER ONE: Coverboy Shoplift
Buffalo, NY
October 13 1973
Rask told the driver to park the Rolls at the factory gates and stay with the car. He and Indira proceeded on foot to the warehouse where the gig was being held. No sense in attracting attention—this was a moment for maximum discretion. A half-full moon on the wane hovered in the clear night above the derelict industrial zone.
He’d left his feather boa and big floppy velvet hat in the car. Raskal Bolden couldn't just appear in full glam drag in the middle of a hick kids' freakout. Besides, he still had the heebie-jeebies about the proximity of the Canadian border and all the hassle the Mounties'd handed to him last time he was in the area. He knew they couldn't operate on the US side, but still felt the need for circumspection. They always got their man, after all.
From just outside the warehouse there was a faintly audible rumble. The place was an industrial derelict like you might see anywhere in England, but different somehow, more American, more... violent. The English factory when it’s emptied decays into soft regret and grubby nostalgia, while the American factory becomes a site of desperate transformations. Post-industrial meant a much more dangerous thing in this country than at home.
The noise inside the thick swing doors was unbelievable. Rask Bolden had spent the last four years around some of the loudest rock music on the planet, and made a fair bit of that noise himself, but this was another thing entirely. It jarred your ribcage and trembled through your skull. Indira wouldn't go any further inside until Rask took off his fur mittens and jammed them under her earmuffs, using his silk cravat to fasten them tight to her head. With this ear protection in place, she stepped inside alongside him.
Kids across the world, in London, New York, L.A., Paris, Berlin, all tried to glam themselves up for the night out. Not these kids. They were like hobos or accident victims. They had homemade haircuts and rancid jeans, sweaters with beerstains and rips taken out of them. They were ill-fitting for this world and they knew it.
They gave this sparkling pair of newcomers the side-eye as they advanced towards the stage. Apparently nobody recognized rockstar Rask, and so they were just another pair or spangly poseurs from NYC, here at this upstate zoo to gawk at the natives. Flash tourists slumming it with the borderzone scumdogs.
Industrial arclight lamps and Marshall stacks with holes punched in them surrounded a truck-loading platform. There was no semblance of order: the light jagged everywhere like an old German horror movie, and there were power cables scattered all over the floor which tripped up the kids as they moshed.
There he was, the kid they’d been telling Rask about, now standing in the middle of the loading-area stage, with high-beam arclights stabbing at his scrawny frame. He was shirtless, ragged leather pants sagging around a bony waist. Long lanks of mouse-brown hair. Sweat pouring off his face as he yelled God-knows-what into the mic.
This specimen of malnourished American youth, with his misshapen goblin face, brawl-bent nose and deadsoul Gogol eyes, should have been a hideous thing to behold. Yet something about him sent a quivering thrill through Rask, and he felt a galvanic shock of desire pulsing over from Indira at his side.
Fuck me God, Fuck me mama! yelled the singer. The gaunt guitarist at his side stabbed a stiletto chord and Rask’s ears bled resultant. The drummer stomped away into the hollow night of the warehouse bent on his own savage beat, barely in contact with the rest. The bass player was lying on the floor yelping and tugging a bassline that related only remotely with the drumbeat. It was an impure hellish cacophony. It was magnificent.
"He's gonna do another striptease!" yelled a zonked-out biker in stinky bloodstained club colors leaning in toward Rask. He was yelling at full bore, his spittle flying out around him like a sudden squall, but the biker’s throaty voice sounded no louder than a whisper at church. "He's gonna show you his thing!" For some weird reason, the need to see the singer's thing was more urgent than any need Rask had ever felt before in his life.
Rask Bolden was in trouble. It was the kind of trouble, he thought to himself, that he might just end up chasing to its bitter, beautiful, bloody end.
October 1973
Rask and the Ruffians at #3 on the US Billboard Hot 100 singles chart with “Electrified Honey”
and at #1 in the UK singles chart with “Spaceman Solitude”
The first time I saw Raskal Bolden’s face, he made a criminal of me. Oh, I’d heard him many a dozen times before, sat on a sagging deck chair out front of the trailer under a dry Montana sun, tuned in to the radio station I only put on when daddy was gone working the fields or drinking in town till all hours.
Rask’s voice through the grainy speaker was raucous and ecstatic as he sang of dancing with an ambiguous lover, boy or girl or both at once, pissing off his parents, the glamor of revolution… all of it over garish yet chic guitars and beats I could barely tap my toes fast enough to keep up with.
But his face, which until then had existed only as a mockup mug in my mind, greeted me for the first time in the supermarket, grinning wickedly amidst the sea of other placid stodgy stars plastering the covers of the checkout magazines, I knew I was looking at Rask Bolden before I’d even seen his name.
The deep V of his bright vest, the spread of his tight spandex-clad legs, the outlandish shock of hair on his head. He seemed somehow in motion beneath the Rolling Stone header, an impossible miracle. He held everything in the world within that wild grin. I was smitten by something I could only barely recognize within myself. Not admiration, not hero-worship. Pure unadulterated lust.
While momma paid the cashier and the folks behind us loaded up the belt, I took a copy from the display and slipped it discreetly down the backside of my pants. I knew I needed to be secretive about this, the same way I knew I could only listen to Rask’s music when daddy was away. I was sweating the whole way home, but momma never noticed those twin bulges forward and back within my jeans.
But the first time Rask Bolden saw my face, at some bootleg gig in a Buffalo warehouse, I was in rapture–I didn’t see him seeing me. There was the stuttering, stumbling sound all around me. There was my own untrained voice tearing up my throat just how I liked it. The crowd beneath me while I cut my hips in hard swivels, they were indiscernible from one another, nothing more than a gyrating mass of sweat and stink and potential desire.
I don’t know how I could have finished the set had I known Rask’s eyes were on me. No way I might have done what was becoming my signature strip tease–a tantalizing showing of the base of my cock or the flat plain of my ass, depending on the night–knowing that this man was just below me through it all.
What I must have looked like to him–all limbs let loose like gunfire, malnourished as I was, holding the band together with sheer audacity and an unhealthy dose of bathtub speed.
It was a great set, maybe. I tended to leave the feeling of them on the stage or in the eyes of my onlookers, but there was definitely some spiritual gunk in my chest that I excavated up there. That’s the good shit, for sure—a purge of the pain and all the rage in a noisy retching splurge of rock.
Whatever-the-fuck I’d thought of it was out the window when I two-stepped off the stage to find him, Raskal fucking Bolden, waiting for me at the bottom of the steps. I blinked. The scary chic-looking woman past his shoulders blinked right back. Brown-skinned, slender, impossibly elegant like one of those models. I’d never seen anything quite as precious and fragile as the curve of her slim neck.
The room seemed to hush around our meeting like blown-out eardrums, though no one seemed to be looking our way, making nothing of the monumental moment. The span of my life narrowed to this barrel tunnel between myself and this man, greater than man, legend, impossibly large yet condensed into this narrow frame– turned out we were the same height, while I’d fantasized him giant-like in his lechery.
He grinned wickedly, the same grin I’d shoved down the back of my pants in Montana. This man had made a criminal of me. Now, he extended a worn hand, fingers thick and guitar-string-calloused. I took the immortal hand, stupidly, more meekly than I knew myself to be capable of. With a jolt, I felt I was touching a god.
Rask leaned in and asked, “What’s your name, kid?”
I told him, dry-mouthed, “Tommy Norris, sir.”
He looked over his shoulder, still holding my hand. The woman–maybe I recognized her from the fashion magazines?– simply shrugged.
To me, Rask shook his head and sucked through his teeth. “Tommy Norris ain’t no name for what you do up there. I suggest you find a bigger name, cat. There’s big stuff coming for ya.”
My world shifted hard on its axis. How many times my life had started over–Montana choirboy to runaway beatnik to teen prostitute to screaming wraith on crumbling stages with all the hope that the world just might hear me–but only then, with Rask’s hand in mine, did life really begin.
And only with the taking of his own life down the long road of time would the substance of mine end. That there—that’s love, I think.
Well, that’s love to me, anyway.
EPILOGUE: Yardhound Blues
Onaga, Kansas
Present Day
In an old farmyard on an ancient plain there's an old dog who’s set to howling at the moon. Once he prowled around the world, sniffing this and peeing on that. Now his wandering days are done, and he sings the blues by keening soft and steady at the heedless moon.
He howls for those who were lost in the time before, those who slipped over the momentary ledge of now and into the void of tomorrow. For loved ones who were once also hated but now aren't anything at all.
It's a decrepit farmhouse with a single blasted oak at the bottom of a wide-open sky. Galaxies, stars and planets crawl over the dog’s head as he howls. And presiding over all that silent glory is the half-moon, poised between her waxing and her waning, held in limbo. The dog howls at the moon and asks that she swell and give birth to a new time, because he can't bear this time any more.
He thinks back to the old-young dog he was when he met a pirate king on the broken shore of the past. He'd had a dream of that king before he even met him and it was an alluring and comforting dream of love. That pirate king is gone now, but the love is still here, and all the hurt is too.
I howl and I howl at the moon. My name is Tommy, but they call me a monster and they are right to do so. They call me Hex, and I am a hex. I’m a curse, and I bring my accursed share to all of those I love.
This one dog will die here soon, alone and unloved. There are millions who think they love me, but they love my wildness and my courage to shit upon all that they and their parents once held sacred. They don’t know me. If they did, they would hate me just as much as I do myself.
I howl my hate for myself, my love for one who offered himself to me as a mistaken sacrifice, for the broken woman lying by the pool. I yelp my impotent lust to the blighted moon. I howl and howl until I’m hoarse then with no voice left, I start to sing.
====== [ USABLE FUDGE // END ] ======
Video Ten “Moon Howler Serenade” by A.P. Murphy
Music “Moanin’ Blues” by John Lee Hooker
Video Extract from Local 58 web series
So beautifully wrecked. I really loved this. The backwardness was disorienting in a way I can only imagine living a life on drugs and nerves can be. So good you guys, wow.
Absolutely superb. The vibes, the tragedy and all that beautiful mess.