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CHAPTER SIX: Hated by God
Chott el Djerid, Tunisia
July 16 1976
The acid kicked in and Rask felt his six-gun pistols become snakes. He looked down and they were writhing in his hands. He threw them down onto the sand and started wailing like a child.
"Cut, cut!" Giancarlo the director stepped away from the camera. Giancarlo was a tall and handsome Milanese, and Rask wondered why he wasn't starring in the film instead of making it. He was waving his arms, which formed kaleidoscopic wings in the air, making him look like a warrior angel.
He came over to where Rask knelt, with the gunbarrels writhing and hissing at him on the sand. "Rask, what the matter wit' you now, eh?"
Rask looked over to Giancarlo. At his core he felt beatific, channeling a primal force of life spirit, though there was a tinge of panic at the edges that could swarm across his consciousness at any moment. Serpent guns were not helping, though now he looked down and they were just props again. "Sorry Giancarlo, I did a tab before we started and it just kicked in. I'm trippin' balls right now, man."
"Rask, just 'cause this is an Acid Western, don't mean you gotta do the acid alla time, eh? You could just act tripped-out, you know, bello?"
"Yeah, man, I'm sorry. I just need a few minutes while the peak passes."
Giancarlo straightened up and turned. In profile he adopted the likeness of a giant noble eagle. Rask thought he should ask him to fly them away to where everything was cool.
"Okay everyone! That's lunch! Back at your positions in thirty minutes!" He looked at his watch - giant, gold, its mechanism spilling out and sprouting golden cogs and springs all along his arm. "That's at twelve-thirty. Drink plenty water, people! Gonna get real hot real soon!"
Rask sat on his poncho on a sand dune overlooking the plain to the east. Losie sat beside him, dressed as a señorita from a Mexican cantina, holding him around the shoulder and humming gently. The sun was vertical overhead, their shadows were dark suggestions clasped around them looking for shelter. Rask had peaked and was calming rapidly with the aid of Losie’s soothing hum. Soon he would be good to go, but he felt his enthusiasm for this penny-ante movie project waning fast.
Far across the plain was another film crew, making some science-fiction movie. A bunch of men in white shining suits of plastic armor with white helmets, maybe robots. Space troopers. A different guy all in gold, definitely a robot. Hot work. A rolling trashcan thing. An old man in a robe and a blond kid in beige rags. Some bearded guy in a baseball cap marshalling everyone around, actually using a megaphone like a parody movie director from a skit.
"Maybe westerns are done and dusted, and space is where it's at now, babe," he said, waving towards the robots and the space troopers three hundred yards off.
"Maybe, but we gotta finish this thing anyway,” said Losie. “You signed a contract with the studio, baby. Besides, Dylan is in a western. Jagger is in a western."
"But Bowie is in a space thing."
"You can get yourself in a space thing! All it takes is to show you can be just as much the professional in the film industry that you are in the music biz."
Rask sighed, heart like a heavy stone of emptiness. The comedown was a comedown. "Losie, darlin’, it could be all of rock music is done and dusted, and that Diplodocus is dead as a... dead as a dinosaur," he said, and started giggling girlishly at his own wit despite the overlay of despair that hung over his noonday crash.
"I don't think so, baby," said Losie. She had a look of grim obligatory optimism on her face like a coach addressing a team that was losing by a wide margin but could still salvage some honor. "We still got it. You still got it. You're only twenty-eight, sugar. Got it all goin' on. World tour, new album, sharper look - you know what it's like when we're up there on stage. Can't nobody rock like you, Raskie."
But Rask got a flashback of Hexei Monstrance performing "Dig In Deep" in London last year, raking his sexy scrawny frame across the stage just like the very first time ever Rask saw him. That night in a grimy warehouse he knew at a glance that the kid would bring the world to its knees.
Hex’d only gotten better and punkier since that first show, and at the Roundhouse every head turned with unlimited lust toward the hellish horny beast on stage. Rask couldn’t stop himself smiling the whole show long because he knew there was at least one cat out there who could rock like him.
But there was an envious beast that said that Hex was more. Better. Rawer. Roar.
Rask now found to his great surprise that he was roaring. The robots and the old man from the sci-fi shoot looked over to where he sat screaming into the sun, this bedraggled bandit and his wolfish grief.
The baseball cap guy detached a squad of flunkies to run over to that sand dune and try to calm that extraneous freak. Try and calm him right the fuck down.
July 1976
Diplodocus at #87 on the UK album chart and #114 on the
US Billboard Album chart with "Diplo Diploma"
Hexei and the Thrusters at #12 in the UK, #18 in the US, #3 in Japan
and #1 in West Germany, France and Sweden with "Full Thrust Power"
Berlin, West Germany
July 21 1976
I hit my head on the bottom of the world. The thought made me giggle even as the back of my skull throbbed like an unimportant tumor, a dull pulsing out of sync with the erratic and hellish beat displacing the very air. The bottom of the world was the low ceiling of a Berlin nightclub which was rough and wet–the air tasted metallic, bloody, bodies turning their insides out. Bodies displaced.
Berlin by way of London by way of Manhattan by way of Billings. Those were just words to me. Here and now was a thick and heavy beat, an industrial grind of savage lust, a low ceiling dripping with clammy sweat.
I reached for what looked like Higgy’s shoulder to ask him the name of the nightclub, thinking I’d already asked him this before, and was surprised to find that my right hand was loosely holding a man’s penis, and even more surprised to find that penis was mine as it fell from the fly of my departing trousers. So I enlisted my other hand to extricate this right one from its situation, only to find that this left hand was wrapped around another man’s penis, and this man was unconscious, leaning against the wall with his knees bent bowlegged and piss staining the low crotch of his jeans–piss that was warm on my hand.
Carefully, as though defusing a bomb, I removed both hands from both penises at the same time. Nothing horrible happened and nothing good either. I wiped off the piss on my own pants, pulled them back up to barely rest on my jagged hips. Which protruded, which threatened to escape me. Would it matter if they did.
Nothing belongs to anything. Nazis are the future.
There was a crumpled-up napkin in my pocket on which I’d written some lyrics in Gil’s bed, or against the wet tile of a bathroom stall or hunched over on the sidewalk. My eyes struggled to focus through layers of grimy hallucination. The handwriting looked to belong to someone else.
God hate me
This divide through space
A bubble reversing gravity
Is no place called home
Backwards is the only time
I looked up–to tell someone I’d written the end of my life–but there wasn’t a single face around me that I could recognize.
London, England
August 1 1976
Heathrow Airport was a state. A state of war. Baggage handlers were on strike. Losie and Rask pushed into the scrum along with everyone else to pull their bags off the stacked-up carts that had been wheeled in and just left there. Rask was wearing big dark shades and had his trademark curly hair all bundled up in a floppy straw hat. Sure enough, nobody recognized him.
But did they fail to recognize him for the disguise, or because he just wasn't recognizable any more, just an ordinary duffer? He could test them—tear off the sunglasses and the hat, shake out his dark locks, and stand revealed as the roguish Rask Bolden of the golden Ruffians years. But what if nobody noticed? He grabbed his bag, passed Losie hers, and tried to put it all out of his mind.
London Heathrow was just as hot as the desert of Tunisia. They edged through the throng outside and meléed politely and quite Englishly - limited elbows, shove simultaneous with apology - until at last they found themselves in a black cab. Losie had picked up the latest Melody Maker in W.H. Smiths.
MM had said they were going to run a profile of Rask to go with the latest interview by Julie Eagleton. There was nothing: no interview, no profile. There was a center spread on the Berlin scene, though. Here was Hexei, blood and saliva speckled round a face contorted in ecstasy, being crowd-surfed around some filthy Neukölln dive. The walls sprayed with graffiti: R.A.F., Freiheit für Palästina, Ich bin Queer.
On the taxicab radio, Bowie was singing of these Golden Years. It was the finest music ever played on broadcast airwaves, a sublime gift and memorial to the Long Hot Summer. But right here in the paper, Bowie was saying that fascism was the best thing ever, and that he himself would make a wonderful Hitler because he was so insane. He was dressed as a Gestapo officer in black leather trenchcoat on this page, while over there on that page he was a cabaret tart in silk petticoat and garter stockings, monster hands clutching at his his slimboy non-tits. Just what the fuck was going on?
Before they went home, they got the taxicab to stop at the Wardour Street offices of the band's management to pick up mail. London was a stew, a vile miasma. Binbags and slopped-out kitchen waste stacked high in the Soho sidestreets. Dialectical graffiti said Wogs Out and Rock Against Racism. What was going on?
Band manager Johnny Five-Fingers McGraw was in the office. Johnny didn't much care for the comings and goings of fashion. He'd settled on a sharp mod look round about 1964 and had never once varied from that gentlemanly splendor. Today he was in a handcut Saville Row double-breasted suit in powder blue Prince of Wales check and matching homburg with lilac hatband. His green silk tie and carnation buttonhole, the whole ensemble in fact, issued an unspoken reprimand to scruffy Rask now stepping inside clad in dusty poncho and ragged straw sunhat. Rask had a sudden hard twinge of nostalgia for his mod days: scooters, slick suits and tidy haircuts, grooving all night to Detroit soul. Golden Years.
"Hey-up! Just the fella!" chirped out Johnny Five-Fingers, a Lancashire lad, lordly in his dandy finery. "I got Hexei Monstrance on the line for you, Raskie chuck. He's called long-distance from Berlin five times already today. Look sharp now, Raskie, talk some sense into ‘im, willyer?"
And he held out the fat black phone receiver to Rask. This dense thing, much heavier than plastic should be, weighty as destiny, was like a weapon about to be discharged. A thin voice on the other end scratched out spare despairing sounds: "Hello? You there? Hello?"
"Says he's dying," said Johnny Five.
Berlin, West Germany
August 1 1976
“Dying?” The voice on the other end now queried. “Hex–what’s going on? Where are you?”
Even the sound of my name in his mouth when held as delicately as a pearl, it could not soothe.
“I’m everywhere,” I replied, the phone only held against my face by the grace of gravity, my hands traversing some coarse alien terrain I could not see. “I’m nowhere. I’m in decay, Raskal Bolden.”
He exhaled hard. There was muted discussion on the other line. My head lolled forward and the phone clattered to the floor and I scrambled over the man between my legs to pick it back up.
He was a pretty boy on his knees, just graduated from college in Stuttgart he’d told me, sweet honey skin and tightly curled hair. Jürgen or Jörg, or something else with an umlaut. A strong German brow, containing contemplations worthy of his master race when not given over fully to thoughts of gobbling cock. Unperturbed by the disturbance, he continued bobbing on my half-hard dick, more committed to the repetitive motion than anything else.
“–dying or you’re not, which one is it?” Rask was saying when I brought the phone back to my ear.
There was something burning in the ashtray beside me so I took a long hard drag on it before replying. “I’m dying, then. Definitively. There’s no more art left in me, Rask. They keep asking for…” my vision blurred for a moment, perhaps a long one, but I picked up right where I left off. “More. More, more, more. I’m emptied out, entirely.”
The scene occurring between my legs repeated itself in shifting mosaic across this dark and smoldering room, bodies, slithering skin, sweat catching light and scattering. Gil’s room–or. Wherever. Genitals rubbing like flat tires flapping. Moaning as parody, discordant music rising from the streets or through the crack in a door. Assaulting nonsense, all of it.
I pushed the pretty boy down farther on me and thought he could widen his jaw and swallow my body whole and I wouldn’t feel any of it. I’d end up nowhere, would disperse into a million aimless particles or a puddle of piss in an alley–anything or nothing.
Rask was speaking and I hadn’t been listening. “–through periods like this, mate. They come and go, yeah? Me too, I’ve just been… You’re a fucking rockstar, Hex. A real, bonafide god damn fucking rockstar. Okay? I wouldn’t bloody say that unless–”
His pause came on suddenly and it took me another long drag to understand that he’d stopped speaking because I’d begun sobbing, audibly and violently. The tears spouted of their own volition and I hacked on the smoke in my lungs and breathed it back in and the feeling of it belonged to nothing and no one.
I choked up this final bit, through blubbering baby tears, from the emptiest place in the most emptiest heart of mine: “Please come and get me, Rask. I love you, baby.”
The phone went limp with my tired wrist at the same time as I came in the pretty German youth’s mouth without a sound and he went right to sleep on my bare thigh. God hate me.
Video Five - “Acid Western” by A.P. Murphy
Movie extracts from El Topo by Alejandro Jodorowsky
Music - “Memories of a Free Festival” by David Bowie
Mmmm, the story has me in thrall and the video's got me all nostalgic for those old-tyme parties.