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Chapter Three: Cutup Dropdown
St Louis, Missouri
February 14 1974
That grand extravagant gesture, the 1974 US tour, half done. Halfway through the tour dates set up to bid goodbye to the glam face of Rask and his Ruffians, halfway across the USA, halfway through a gram of the purest cocaine ever imported to the state of Missouri.
The King Suite at The Chase Hotel was named after a historic stay just the summer before by the most distinguished royalty of the age. A bellhop informed Rask of the key details on receipt of a fifty-dollar tip. Rask didn’t much care whether any of it was true or not. Lore was lore, and it all intrigued him. One day, he felt, similar legends would be crafted around his person. The main thing was the accretion of lore around the icon, a patina of anecdote and belief that only adds to the grandeur.
This is how it went: October 13, 1973. The King had wolfed down fifteen cheeseburgers and fingered a honey from Cleveland in a Pan-Am stewardess outfit right here on this very bed. He’d dozed off in a stupor before the deed could be consummated, upon which the bodyguards had paid off the trolley-dolly and edged her out of the suite. While the King snoozed, the entourage then mounted their own show, callgirls and bennies, on the penthouse terrace, but later spread the word that it was their boss who’d raised such hell.
But the King lay pooled in his own vomit - right there! Bubblin’ breath through the puddle. Bottom right-hand corner of the bed. All cleaned up now, mind, nary a whiff of it today.
Or so went the legend as recounted by the bellhop. Rask retold it now to those present in the Suite. They clustered on the bed: his wife Indira, just in from NYC, Rog Hawkins the Ruffians’ drummer, Hexei Monstrance and his sidekick Jilk from the Monsters, some groupie chick who was with one, or other, or both, and Spike Mullins from Hackney, most loyal of all the roadies from Rask’s mod days a full decade before. A collision of many timelines on this bed.
It was roadie Spike who’d scored the coke, lifting it from some squirt trying to get backstage at the gig. Hexei’d made him hand over $20 to the squirt so it wasn’t stealing. Hexei was sweet that way, a sweetness he hid behind the snarling aggression of his garage rock sound and the wildness of his performance.
Rask insisted that Hexei and the Monsters opened for the Ruffians on the US tour. Manager Jellicoe Howell had balked at having these untried hicks who could barely play signed up to support Rask and the Ruffians, but Rask told him they were the Next Big Thing, this rawness, this wild spirit, and that maybe that was the way he himself would go when the tour wound up and when glam was pronounced dead forevermore.
The sun went down as they chugged through the coke, tapes of glam and garage and prog and soul and funk cycling through the tape deck. Spike had gone to bed, or gone out to score something to calm himself down. At one point someone put on a cassette tape of Burroughs interviewing Bowie, and they all laughed at the wild exchange:
Bowie: I usually don’t agree with what I say very much. I’m an awful liar.
Burroughs: I am too.
They got to talking about Burroughs’ cut-up and how Bowie was using it now too, and decided they would all talk in cut-up from now on. Hexei tried to make a martini and failed. He took to slugging the vodka neat.
“Line another mate here have,” said Rog the drummer. He was trying cut-up but found it hard going, while the others were becoming more fluent. He had a swig of vodka and found it helped.
“Friends to drink health let’s our good,” said Rask and held up his martini glass. The olive fell out onto the lush wool carpet, a small green egg nesting in the whiteness.
“Love you I,” said Hexei, looking at Rask with his vodka held high. The laughing stopped abruptly.
“What?” said Rask and Indira and the groupie chick all together. They stared at Hexei as Burroughs' voice droned on evenly from the tape deck. Bowie was catching the same inflection, the same laconic syntax as Burroughs. He’d always been such a chameleon.
“Just, like, I love all o’ you, you know, all you-all, that’s all,” Hexei said, and just this once the hardcore rocker looked bashful as a schoolboy. “Ya know, it’s like Valentine’s Day, and I guess you’re like all my Valentines.”
The groupie chick giggled and hugged him close, and Jilk hugged her. They squirmed some on the bed and Rog Hawkins the drummer folded himself into them. Hexei peeled away. The mass of the other three became involuted, a squirming tangle of cheesecloth and leather and searching fingers grasping for fistfuls of flesh.
“That’s great, Hex,” said Indira, raising her glass and looking across at him as he looked up from the threesome. “We all love you too.” But as the mouth curlicued into a smile, her gaze on his face was as cold as frost.
This stony indifference of Indira’s that night would make an immovable statue of her in the memories of all who witnessed. This was the face of a woman who would not be moved but by an equal force of righteous belief. Forces would counteract each other and certain vectors would result. Ghostly trajectories which could be traced in the obscurity of night alone.
St Louis, Missouri
February 15 1974
6.47am
As the day dawned fresh and chill, the pinklight flooding through the open balcony doors, Rask found himself awakening slumped in the armchair in Hexei’s room, next door to The King Suite. The groupie chick was on the bed with Rog the drummer, top-to-toe, still in her roseate dirndl and floppy hat. Jilk lay across them both, bare ass to the air. All were snoring.
In The King Suite, in the place where the King had dozed while laying in his own vomit, Hexei slept face sideways. He had sicked up some himself, thus usurping some spurious measure of that legendary glory as his own. Lightning has struck twice in this small place. Myths clutch each other and coalesce.
A monotone voice intoned softly from the tape deck. Bill Burroughs and Bowie, cut-up/mixed-in: This ain't rock'n'roll this is genocide choked to death with part-time television they pulled you out of the oxygen tent uncontrolled flash bulbs popped in rumors found dead of the old evacuation, the elevator's broke, slide down a rope...
And Indira Chantal Kumar lay twelve storeys below on the patio beside the pool. Her head was cracked and her leg bent in an impossible geometry of death. The blood pooled in rivulets on the smooth cold tiling beneath her. She hadn’t made a single sound as she fell.
Rask was woken by the screaming of the groupie chick as she stood at the railing of the balcony. Her rose-colored dirndl was torn down one side. She screamed non-stop, leaning out over the railing and leaving soft slow trails of puke dangling like melting candlewax to glisten in the early morning roselight and tarnish the taut body below.
February 1974
Rask and the Ruffians at #1 on the Billboard singles chart with “Speedballer”
The Monsters at #54 on the Billboard singles chart with “Jellico Harvest Swarm”
New York, NY
February 20th 1974
I borrowed Jilk’s black suit for the woman’s funeral. His grandad had died the year before and his mom the year before that and his sister the year before that–it went on for a while, there was hardly a year in which death hadn’t touched his flagellating heart. He wore a little less black every time death came knocking. Though his weight would fluctuate depending on his drug of choice at the time–we were both deep into coke then, our bodies stringbeans twinned one to the other–he always wore the same suit. It was shaped large and lumpy, built for repelling condolences.
Before we were lovers, then bandmates, then friends, then some very moden combination of all three, Jilk had taught me how to hustle. Back when I, fresh and grubby-looking, first hopped off the bus from Montana, where daddy and momma were probably not wondering much where I’d gotten to. I already knew how to cruise, in a small-town dilettante way, but Jilk showed me how to do it for utility rather than pleasure. Beat-up beat poets all wanted me–adjectives stuck to my skin; I was starved yet full; I moved, touched, fucked like any number of things–and they never had any money for me but they slept on mattresses. A place to sleep was all the money I needed once upon a time.
Jilk sent me off with a smooch on the cheek that I could not return. The rest of The Monsters would be in attendance but Jilk’s dad was dying so that was his thing. I tied a sad, cerulean noodle scarf around my neck–I’d already relinquished eyeliner and lipstick for the funeral. I would be allowed a bit of fashion flair. A dash of color, nothing more.
Rask had his driver pick me up in the Rolls but I was surprised to find Rask himself in the backseat. We kissed the corners of one another’s mouths. I never, hardly ever, knew what to say to Rask and so I refrained from thought and let words move straight from heart to mouth, resulting in some of the usual buffoonery, but endearing like a kid trying really hard to say gwilled cheez. On stage I knew I was charming–off stage, I could only hope, at least when it came to Rask. But what do you say to a man whose wife you may have killed one bright St Louis morning a week before?
Not much to say now, though, and certainly nothing to pull from my heart. The tour on pause, of course. Glam still needed to die–-or had it died with the twisted body outside the Chase Hotel? Maybe the stomp-n-glitter was on extended life support? I wanted to get back on the road. Bodies crawling over barriers for a taste of my spit. My tasseled leather jacket. How much skin to show on any given night. Would I do enough to get Rask alone. Love you, I.
“She’s curating overwrought art exhibits in heaven,” I said. Cute presumed-murderer dialogue. Rask exhaled.
“Fuck.” He watched snow falling out the window past my shoulder. “I forgot about the fucking gallery. It’s so much shit to sell, Hex.”
My name in his mouth, biting down.
I rode to the gallery with him the next day, heads in our hands, nursing a cocktail of various hangovers. The drinking started in the car, the snorting started at the funeral, and any number of things might have happened between the first white line and the first rays of sun pressing hot daggers against our eyelids the next day. I was in his bed, naked, half draped across him. Rask still in his funeral clothes. My asshole puckeringly unfucked. I don’t know what happened. Mostly I know what didn’t happen.
Rask’s manager, Jellicoe Howell, met us at the gallery. Installations were being dismantled and boxed up. Paintings pulled from walls, nails removed and holes cleanly plastered over. Some pieces were Indira’s, most were not. Jellicoe had found buyers for all in record time–everyone wanted a piece hand-picked by the famously dead wife of Raskal Bolden. It was a quick clean-up job.
The papers gave it the most salacious and immortalizing spin that they could. One passerby of the hotel early that morning reported a hellish shriek from on high–whichever poor soul had first spotted Indira’s crumpled body and released the noise Indira never made in her fall. Most likely that groupie chick, the one who vanished. This came to be known as Indira’s Post-Mortem Scream. Accretions of lore.
Another individual in a neighboring building reported the simultaneous tossing open of every window on the west side of the Chase Hotel and a hundred heads extending like so many meerkats from their burrows to peer at the carnage below. The scene was likened to an Advent calendar on the final day before Christmas. No surprises left.
What was true, what was exaggerated–unimportant. The police declared it suicide while the world declared it a tragedy, meaning it could be anyone’s fault for any number of reasons. Some strange guy in a trenchcoat who said he was a doctor went around tying up loose ends. A tragedy as a tapestry of many truths and falsehoods, together making something possibly more true than the truth itself. Over time, this tapestry would become fact but the patchwork of its pieces was still being woven together.
All seemed to agree that Indira’s death had something to say about Raskal Bolden even if Rask himself had said nothing public just yet.
Rask watched his wife’s work systemically condensed and shipped off without a word. I laid my sweet head on his shoulder but said nothing either. Couldn’t seem to bury my two hands deep enough into my pockets.
All in all, the erasure of Indira Chantal Kumar took no more than two hours. The only piece left in the end was an unlisted Indira original pulled from the uncomfortably sparse archives–she was so much younger than how she carried herself. Though it was a small painting, it was massive in its sweeping depiction of a prairie landscape torn up by seemingly random struts of metal, twisted, unnatural debris, beneath a dark and indifferent sky. Real pieces of metal–paper clips, rusted razors snapped to tiny bits, slippery cut up guitar strings–were woven through the swatches of paint. A blank world ripped up by an uncaring god. Totally devoid of color.
“Take it,” Rask insisted. He wouldn’t look at it.
So I took it.
From that time on, Indira’s painting went up on the wall of every bedroom I would live in, however briefly. Jilk got his suit back in time for another funeral.
Within the week I’d be donning my leather jacket again, dripping sweat on all the young punks hungry for me, and if I went a little more wild on stage than normal, if I howled as though in penance, it only made the crowds reach harder for a lick of me.
Video Eight “STL Dawn Terminate” by A.P. Murphy
Music “Rock and Roll Suicide” by David Bowie
Art installations by Edward Kienholz
Now I'm hanging, hanging, for chapter one, so that I can go back round it all again.