USABLE FUDGE - a glampunk story

Chapter Five: Onlooker Massacre

A.P. Murphy

and

James Worth

Mar 14, 2025

Welcome to Usable Fudge!
Check the chapters here

Ten / Nine / Eight / Seven / Six / Five [this chapter] / Four / Three / Two / One

CHAPTER FIVE: Onlooker Massacre

London, England
October 7 1975

“These are not the bodies I want to see. Find me some other bodies.”
“Bodies like what?”
“Like not so meaty. Not so… much. Think skin and bone, think emaciation.”
“That’s gonna be difficult to do and still keep this shoot on schedule, Jacob.”
“Oh fuck. Well, we just have to keep soldiering on. What an utter nightmare.”

You could hear the tiny slice-slice-slice of the shutter and the quick whirring of small precise motors as film was wound on. Every two minutes an assistant handed a new loaded camera to Jacob Rhys-Williams, London’s trendiest fashion photographer, as he went about his work. The concentrated lusting gazes of all the world were focussed through his camera lens right now. A gaze of pure desire imprinted on the film.

Rask gently swayed on the dais platform in distressed suede and stained leather pants, the Diplodocus boys all round him in their cowboy-guardsman finery striking various poses suggestive of defiance and sexual mastery. All of them were straining to be solemn and disciplined. They were taking their cue from Rask and his stoic professionalism at this all-important cover shoot for the new album, working title “Metal Baby Dewdrop”.

He stood with his guitar strapped low, the neck and the head directed stage right to where a sweet brown honey was poised to gobble it. She was kneeling on the top step but her knees were hurting and she’d started to weep and softly moan in pain, reaching up to swipe away the tears in furtive gestures, careful not to mess up her mascara and long Twiggy-style lashes.

Naked and semi-naked girls lay scattered all around the steps of the dais in carefully-arranged disarray. It was not an orgy, but a violent disaster, a sexual calamity. There was blood pooling discreetly on the floor, though only the merest suggestions of it on their actual bodies.

Rask was sweating with the effort to stay upright. The assistant came by from time to time to mop away the beads of chilled sweat from his forehead. To prevent goosebumps forming on the naked girls on the floor, propane heaters had been set up between the lighting rigs. This made the atmosphere in the room a cloying fug of sweat, patchouli, blood made from strawberry syrup, and barely-restrained sexual arousal. Rask’s head swam from the mix and he ached for a soothing line.

It had been Rask’s idea to stage a massacre. Edgy and indicative of the new direction of Diplodocus. Mississippi delta blues expressed with the rawest possible energy. Far from the glam frailty of previous years. Tough and manly, transgressive and in-your-face. The victims were selected to be a mix of white and black, reflecting the group’s new down-home sound.

Rask felt that something wasn’t working in this look but he wouldn’t voice his doubts with this circus in full effect. But he wished more of his bandmates embodied the audacity of Hexei. Men not shaped to resemble rage but born for it. No one eroticized violence quite like Hexei Monstrance, that stupid bastard.

“Okay, people, take a break and we’ll change costume,” called out Jacob the photographer. ”Not you, bodies, you stay where you are.”
“Bu’ I haveta pee!” called out one girl, a redhead with light purplish bruisemarks daubed over delicate freckled skin.
“Hold it in, lovie, we’ll be done in half a jiffy,” said Jacob’s assistant. “You move from where you are and you can forget about getting paid today.”

Things relaxed a bit at the end of the shoot. The Diplodocus boys started to chat up some of the models, who’d grabbed themselves cigarettes and towels. They sponged off the blood syrup and reached for their fab street clothes, pulling on hot pants and hand-knit boob-tubes.

Rask sat in one of those director's folding chairs. He’d had the powder-room visit he needed and was now confident and secure. Just as well, as he was being interviewed by the much-feared Julie Eagleton of the New Musical Express. The NME had turned against glam entirely, and were still dubious about Diplodocus and its heavy rock-blues-soul sound.

“Hasn’t all this been done already?” demanded Julie. “I mean, the Stones were doing London Delta blues pastiche more than a dozen years ago. You yourself did it on your early records, back when you were a mod. Just time standing still, or even going backwards… But there’s a new spirit in the air, ain’t there?” She sat poised with her left hand set to scribble in her ruled reporter’s notebook. An utter bitch, thought Rask. He could practically see unwanted chin hairs growing on her spinster’s face. No need for him to shut off the charm spigot, though. The biz was the biz.

“Well, Julie, the blues is an eternal sound, innit?” Rask these days was back to being the cheeky chappie from Mile End, the lordly posh drawl he’d cultivated in recent years banished to the glam graveyard along with spandex loonpants and spangles in the hair. “Don’t matter if it’s been done, there’s always a great newness in its thick meaty challenge, wouldn’t you say?”

“Some people are suggesting that your revival direction is a rather old-fashioned way to respond to the raw sound of American groups like New York Dolls and Hexei Monstrance, your former associate…”

“Some people are utter fucking bastard losers, wouldn’t you agree, Julie?” blurted Rask in a snarl-purr that he hadn’t expected. “Don’t quote that. I mean, I respect the work of new groups like Hexei… I mean, I love their stuff, and, uh, I’m delighted that he’s doing so well on the continent, but in Britain, well…”

“You know Hexei is here right now, right?” said Julie. “Playing a gig tonight at the Camden Roundhouse?”

“He is? Well, that’s–I mean, I knew that, of course. I mean, I didn’t know, but now that I do–” began Rask, but just then there was a tremendous eruption of noise from the street just outside the basement room.

Diplodocus guys and semi-clad girls crowded to the windows of the studio, tiptoeing up to peer at street level. Rask stood up and pushed his way through the strawberry-scented mass of flesh towards the nearest window. Suddenly there was a release of sexual arousal, a scent of pheromone that surged through the onlookers at the windows.

Just outside the studio, on the street outside, a black London taxicab lay tilted on its side. The driver’s face was scrunched up like supple foreskin against the shattered windshield, a darker stain than strawberry syrup smeared across the glass. The side door was open and a young lady in a formal dress and diamonds was forcing her way out of the vehicle.

Still there was nobody on the street to help. Onlookers stood transfixed by the scene and did not move. The woman was beautiful and wealthy. Blood dripped slowly from her scalp. She staggered out of the cab’s backseat, pushing hard to struggle through the window. Jacob the photographer barked for his assistant to call an ambulance while snapping photos of the scene over the heads of the girls watching.

All the basement onlookers saw that the woman’s dark blue satin dress was torn and her soft flesh was swelling out of the rents. Distant sirens and the hesitant legs of people on the street, starting towards her and then halting, then starting again.

There were moans from the rockers and the models and the photographers gathered at the windows. Desire glands gushed, musky sex pheromones filled the air. Rask was shocked to find that he was moaning the loudest of all.

October 1975

Diplodocus at #34 on the UK album chart and #63 on the US Billboard album chart with “Pennyworth Rattles”

Hexei Monstrance at #16 on the Billboard album chart and #1 on the West German album chart with “Delirium”

“God is a place and it’s beneath your bed,” I snarled, lips wetting the mic.
Heaven is a man and he killed the angels dead.
What more could he want? What more could I give?
What more could he want? What more could I give?
What more could he–

I exhaled hard. “I’m sorry–sorry, can we cut the–yeah. Fuck.”

The whole thing stumbled to a stop, feedback slicing, cymbals shimmering, chords cutting. Fucked-up dullhead soundcheck at the Camden Roundhouse. I sucked in through my teeth and turned to Gord where he perched at the edge of the stage, trying to make himself small.

“Gord,” I started. “I’m not trying to be an asshole. But where on God’s green earth are my fucking backing vocals?” Gord’s face was hiding beneath a curtain of limp black hair, crudely shorn at his shoulders. He held his guitar close to his body like a shield. “I missed them,” he muttered.

“You missed them,” I repeated with a nod. “And how many times now have you missed them?”

“Three times.” He was barely audible.

“Three is a pattern, Gord. Three means the chances of you missing them tonight just shot up. My guitarist missing my backup vocals makes me look like shit, Gord. Do you understand what I’m saying, Gord? Do you think–”

My words caught on the tip of my tongue, my whole damn mouth gone dry. I forgot all about Gord. He was up at the very top of the aisle, Rask, standing by the sound booth watching me while the tech boys scuttled and venue staff barked orders at one another and barbacks wheeled kegs and he was solid behind all of it. It was dark but I could see the secret of a smirk teasing the corner of his mouth. And the lady on his arm.

I handed my guitar to a roadie walking by and jumped from the stage, stepped over chairs and loose cords, up the stairs, never once taking my eyes from him. He greeted me with a loose handshake, his lady watching me over his shoulder. An uncanny sense of having done this all before came over me.

“Who’s the poor bloke?” He nodded at the stage.

I relaxed some at the opportunity to skirt the fact that I hadn’t seen Rask in over a year. To still want to kiss him on the mouth till it bruised in spite of our shared silence. God help me, some things just stay. His ladyfriend grinned knowingly.

“That’s my sorry excuse for a guitarist. If I could just have Jilk back–God I miss that pansy. He’s in Brooklyn last I checked, never left the city, just been hiding from me. He would have loved to play this place, but, well.” I cleared my throat. “Anyway, Gord is a fuck-up extraordinaire. He looks sexy on stage but he’s fucked. I can’t put up with him much longer, I swear.”

I was babbling like a schoolkid. My eyes veered from him to her to him to her.

Rask nodded. “This is Losie,” he said simply. No further introduction but none was needed. She was pretty. Dark skin, darker hair teased out big and well-styled, bright eyes, bright face. She seemed smart and I was irked. Neither she nor he had any right to their happiness without me there.

“You staying for the show?” I asked Rask.
Rask pretended to think. “You know I only ever really saw you perform as an audience member the one time, back when you were Tommy Norris. In Buffalo. Wouldn’t miss it for anything.”

“Well.” I pursed my lips. “You’ve got your pick of seats. I suggest front row, if you don’t mind a little blood, sweat and phlegm.”
“Seats?” said Losie. “I don’t see no seats, Hex.”
“You got me, Losie,” I replied. “No seats, just a filthy mosh pit, but if you stand there I promise to jump all over you and show you a good time.”

I took a tab of blotter in the cab to the afterparty, trying to transmute an incipient sickly feeling. Gord had missed a good third of his cues during the gig. The crowd was roaring too loud to have possibly noticed any of his misses, but I noticed, and I saw Rask take note with an insipid grin tucked into the corner of his mouth and this woman, Losie, with a matching smirk to boot. I was furious. I despised my fury.

We crowded into a murky suite at the Portobello Hotel. Me and Higgy–longtime drummer from the Monsters days, the only one who’d stuck around–and Carey, newish bassist, great drug-getter. A cacophony of groupies, all doing lines in the bathroom. Cigarette smoke already clogged the airways.

I’d invited Rask and Losie and they’d actually shown up. They sat on the couch smoking and talking into one another’s ears with those tiny grins while people staggered and laughed and vomited all around them.

Can my heartbeat live in the fever raging inside me? cried Bowie on the radio. Someone booed Bowie’s change in sound. Gone soft. Lost his edge. Turned poofter, but not in a good way. Not like Hexei. Someone else broke a glass in retaliation. Edge edge edge.

Color sprouted from strange corners of the room. Stains in the carpet seemed to rise up and dance a mean boogie. Higgy handed me a drink and I drank it. This girl we’d dragged along from the show–Jenny was her name–was sitting on my lap with her dry hair scratching at my exposed chest and I grabbed a handful of her backside, sucking hard on her neck while holding Rask’s peering gaze. Check the American rock-and-roller, all red-blooded man all the time. I thought I could read something in his look. Made hunger of him.

At a certain indiscernible hour, I dumped the he-man charade, pushed Jenny from my lap and staggered past Rask toward the bedroom, pushing through waves of cold nausea and unprecedented impossible color. I collapsed on the bed, pulled my pants down and stuck my ass in the air waiting with surety for him to arrive and take me.

But in all that time he never appeared, and I woke up in the same position the next day, ass out, face pressed into the drying spread of my own stale drool. I’d misread the hunger, or something, and not for the first or last time either.