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CHAPTER SEVEN: Metal Squisher
Chicago, Illinois
October 23 1976
The coke wasn't real coke. It had something rancid in it to make the vibe mean. That was why things went the way they did, quite as fast as they did.
"What did you call Losie, arsehole?" Rask was up close and in Sam Gillingham's face. The hot damp air of his furious breath washed all over Sam.
"You heard," muttered Sam. "No need to repeat it." He was uneasy in the presence of Rask's meaner self. Too late, he remembered that while he’d grown up in a boarding school in Wiltshire, Rask had been brought up in the East End of London and had been shanking skinheads while still a teen mod dandy.
"And just what did you say to that Rolling Stone guy? Our band sound is ‘getting too Black’? What the fuck is that?"
"There it is, Rask," said Sam, pushing Rask gently on the chest and edging back toward the door of the suite. "You know how it works in the US, man. Black charts, white charts. Black radio, white radio. Our market is in AM radio replays on AOR stations, and those whitebread folks're just not diggin' our sound right now. Losie and Gina-Rae are pushin' the sound in a souly direction, we need to get back to our old rock groove, mate."
Rask took a breath and attempted to calm himself. He partially succeeded. "We just played Midnight Special two nights ago… did we not rock the fuck out of it, Sammy?"
"Yeah, that was great, but we're still slippin', man. Look at the charts. Look at ticket sales on the tour. You know we're gonna be playin' a half-empty house tonight."
"We'll see. This biz is all about toughin' out the doldrums. That's when the talentless no-hopers start fadin' away, when the real cats step up and show their mettle."
Rask's faux-American accent had gradually returned as they progressed from East Coast to West, and now back again to the Midwest. With the osmosis of place and his chameleonic instinct to fit in, the band’s Chicago stay had seen him manifest a mobster grimace and Al Capone syntax. Or maybe that was just the dodgy coke talking.
Sam opened the suite door and looked to back out into the corridor. With that extra step backward, standing in the threshold, he felt emboldened.
"I'm not the only one who feels this way, Rask." He took one further step out and was now in the safe zone. A bellhop with room service sandwiches and champagne was rolling up. Sam stepped round him and took a bite of sandwich from the trolley.
He continued, mouth full. "Huck an’ Jensen been sayin' the same thing, man. They say Diplodocus is dyin', man." Semi-chomped sandwich mulch rained out over the room-service trolley. The bellhop lifted up his hand to shield his face.
"Fuck off Sam," roared Rask, feeling his rage peaking deliciously, the coke riding the rage to perfection. The service trolley and the bellhop, assailed by half-chewed sandwich slurry, made the perfect accompaniment to this scene. He felt it was legendary. He felt it was mean. He felt rock-and-roll.
The phone rang in the room and Rask looked round. Sam took the opportunity to disappear up the corridor and slipped into a stairway. Rask called after him: "You're fired, you fuckin' weasel!" The bellhop looked at him with eyes wide. An audience of one. Good enough.
Rask strode into the room and went for the phone. The bellhop edged the trolley into the room and started uncorking the champagne. It was band manager Johnny Five-Fingers on the blower.
"Rask, ticket sales have tanked. We took the option to cancel the gig and get a partial return."
Rask picked up a sandwich and nibbled on one edge. Yanks made shitty cucumber sarnies. His composure was back. The bottle popped and the bellhop poured a glass.
"Rask, you hear me? The gig is off."
"Don't matter one little bit, Johnny-boy." The words came out midway East End villain, midway Al Capone. "The band is all broke up anyway."
October 1976
Diplodocus at #63 on the UK singles chart and #55 on the US Billboard chart with "Dinos Are People Too"
Hexei and the Thrusters at #8 on the US Billboard Chart, #1 in Japan, UK, and West Germany with single "Disco Cannibal Massacre"
Onaga, Kansas
October 24 1976
The day before, I was off drugs. Today I was on them again. And I couldn’t decide which reality was more bearable. Both were barren in their own unspecial ways but I was oscillating between the two for a bit of texture. Out the windows, stretching in all cardinal directions, was flat rolling Kansas prairie land.
The sky was all-day-long-every-day blue, a taunting blue, big and round like a fishbowl. Off drugs, I thrashed against the glass. On drugs, the glass thrashed against me.
Penniman was naked next to me on the bed. ‘The Little Pansies on the Prairie’, is what I’d been calling us. I’d been wide awake for hours watching a big blank cloud try to overtake the sky through the window then cede the territory back to the fucking parasitic blue. I rolled on top of Pen until my dick got hard and rubbed it on him some, but he didn’t wake up, so I rolled back off. The cloud had receded off to a thin layer of foam on the horizon. Some powder fell up my nose. The painting on the wall signed ICK looked on indifferently. He’d be here soon so I got out of bed.
Rask had wanted to send me to the same retreat he’d gone to back in ‘74, but I wanted nothing to do with that hippie-dippie commune.Hindus or taoists or whatever. Reminded me of the church back in Montana that daddy brought us to until the priest started making funny faces at me, and even before that the idea of God bored me. A man pretending to be God like that buggy Bhagwan; now that was interesting, but ultimately not what my art needed.
Rask had been dragging me back through London from Berlin when I remembered Pen–who had auditioned for The Thrusters and ultimately been passed on (but made a great lay)–had mentioned the ranch in Kansas his parents had left to him when they died. I called him up and after wrapping up some shit in London (ditching Rask and his bogus lady), we flew out to Topeka. Besides a few one-off shows here and there, we’d been out here for months now listening to New York Dolls, Patti Smith, Pink Fairies, fucking each other silly, writing music and shaping an album. I was taking my time with it. First time I ever had.
Also the first time I’d had something like a muse. All my previous music was about Rask whether or not it was meant to be. Pennie though, he was good to me. Kissed me on the mouth and anywhere else I asked him to. Better at guitar than before, too. Though we were writing and recording on the ranch, the music sounded like Berlin, benders, and rebellion. We could hardly get through a song without whipping our dicks out.
Rask arrived in the afternoon looking jetlagged though he’d only come from Chicago. Pennie made lunch and left the two of us to eat alone. We talked about music for a bit, the TV show he’d started—he wanted me to be a guest, which I agreed to in a surge of good feeling before thinking too hard about it.
Out of politeness, I asked about Losie. He muttered something about her visiting her folks in Chicago. Then he got quiet and walked to the window, looked out on everything going on and on out there in the flatness. “What’s that?” he asked. “Over there.”
I followed his gaze toward the decrepit barn down the road stacked out front with ragged and rusting shards of metal all warped and sagging on itself. “Scrap heap. Pennie’s parents had a, uh, metal squishing thing, whatever the fuck it’s called. Nearest scrapyard is counties off so people would drop off car wrecks here and they’d press it and sell it the blocks to whoever the fuck. Car companies or whatever.”
Rask hummed. “And they’d, what, make the blocks into new cars?”
I joined him by the window and shrugged. “I guess. Circle of life.”
He considered this for a long moment, then his head turned like whiplash and he kissed me hard on the mouth, hot and hungry. I let him feel me up, and then down, and it was like something ferocious had come over him. Hot, angry skin.
I pulled back a bit and he said into the space between, “I want you, Hex. Want you back. For me.”
Breathy, I laughed against his mouth, palmed his bulge through his pants. His eyes were wild. “You never stopped wanting me, did you, old man? You thought about me ever since, huh? The taste of me, the way I move.” I licked his cheek. “The sounds I make.”
He nodded quickly and I took his hand. “Well, come on, then. Me and Pennie’’ll treat you good, baby.”
He faltered. I knew the look–a man not getting just what he wants, exactly when he wants it. “Can’t it just…be you and me? Hex?” He clasped my hand hard. “Come back to London with me. Just us two.”
I could only offer him a slippery, slanty grin. “Baby, I got a good thing going with Pen. We’re good here. You know I don’t belong to anyone nohow. That’s what you want now, isn’t it? Me, finally.”
“I…” he fumbled. “Goddamnit, Hex. I gave you everything. Your whole career, that was me!”
I scoffed, though really I’d taken little offense. “I would have found it all eventually, baby. I was born to be the world’s sexy faggot punk–that’s written in stone. The only thing I ever wanted from you was the thing you couldn’t give. We both know it. And you’re still not ready to give it up, man. Go ahead, tell me I’m wrong.”
The scrapyard out front seemed to call him back and he pulled away from me, the moment punctured and deflated. “Right. Fuck. You…you say you love me. What the hell even is love to you, Hex?”
The buzz of my last line was waning. I kissed him, lingering, on the cheek. “This is love to me, baby,” I said. “This is what love is.”
Jackson's Hole, Wyoming
October 26 1976
Amateur Kerouac. On the road across the midwest. Big finny automobile, Hex driving, Rask in the passenger seat. Not touching, a forcefield of something between.
Jawing, spinning yarns: flat broke in Tuscaloosa, untrousered in Brighton, sweeties in Schenectady, run-ins with the cops in Colchester, Birmingham, Portsmouth, Birmingham…
In true beatnik style, Hex uses bathroom breaks at prairie gas stations on rustic crossroads to flirt with long haul truckers and charge up with a line or two, supplementing that with what he can snort off the back of a roadmap held up by Rask, the eternal passenger.
Then they pull into the ashram. The Bhagwan’s fleet of Rolls and Bentleys has grown. The guru himself is pleased to see Rask, but acts indifferent. He doesn’t ask why they’re here, which is a good thing since there’s no clear definitive answer. Rask isn’t sure if they ever discussed it. They just made their way here. Where do you go when the broke thing don’t fix?
In his pristine quarters, the Bhagwan has a disquisition for them on the nature of time:
“Let us imagine some alien beings whose lives runs opposite to our own. What do they see? Death would come before birth, the blow would follow the wound. But if we could only see it from a point of view beyond the limits of our customary place, or theirs, we might find a reality in which time itself had no direction at all. No before or after. A oneness of time that stretches away from this very moment with no motion at all into the eternal. Stillness.”
Hexei: “That’s real cool, your Bagness, but can I make any cash from that insight of yours?”
Later, after Hex had stepped out to take a piss, or do another line, the Bhagwan asked Rask if he loved this wild man. Rask said they were good friends. The Bhagwan counseled against closer entanglements with this soul, who seemed destined to bring nothing but bitterness and sterility.
Hexei came back and said it was time to get back to Kansas. Rask asked him for a ride to the local airfield. Nothing said on the way there. Their anecdotes had all dried up.
I stayed until his plane tipped up into the sky, precarious box of metal slabs woven into a rigid tapestry, holding itself up by the grace of God. I watched it recede to a stain on the horizon, an ink blot spreading in reverse, shrinking to a point of invisibility.
I’d heard what the Bhagwan said about me through the open window. Bitter and sterile. Well, what other way is there to chase off the man who won’t love you back? I’m a dead end for a man like Raskal Bolden. Don’t hurt no less. In fact, it hurts like nothing I’ve felt before. Not daddy’s belt, not sleeping on the streets of Manhattan, not watching a woman’s cold face silently slipping to the unimpeachable earth below me.
No, nothing hurt like giving up Rask. The Bhagwan was right about time, though. I’ve been giving up Rask my whole life and I’ll be giving him up till I’m dead. Concurrently, there’s some other world where we never met, and that’s the one where our love doesn’t end.
Chicago, Illinois
October 28 1976
Back at the hotel, Losie had started to tell Rask all about her Auntie June in Bronzeville and her battle with the bottle, her encroaching dementia, but he cut her off.
“Pack your shit. We’re going back to London. Band didn’t work out.”
“Rask, honey, what do you mean? Band didn’t work out? What the fuck?”
“Just what I said, darlin’. Diplodocus is a goner, I’m going solo, back to London. It ain’t what-do-you-call-it, it ain’t rocket surgery.”
Losie stood up and adopted The Posture, hand on hip, head cocked. Sass switch set to the full On position.“You’re goin’ solo. And just what the fuck about me? Huh?”
Rask attempted a charming grin. Must have been the residue of the mean coke or something, but it didn’t come out that charming. Sort of sinister, in fact.
“Aw, Losie, darlin’ you’re still my woman, you can be workin’ with me, you an’ me, we ain’t broke up. That is, unless you, you know…”
He paused suggestively. Was he suggesting…? Was the mean coke suggesting…?
Losie regarded him coolly. Cold like blue laserbeams made of icicles. “Boy, you out of yo motherfuckin’ mind? What you sayin’, we broke up too?”
“No, I’m not sayin’, Losie.” He dropped in a beat. “Maybe you’re sayin’.”
Losie took a step forward, slapped him once, hard. Rask’s graveyard clown grin altered not one jot. He felt himself sailing up towards the ceiling of the hotel suite, ready to coast out the window and over the streets of Chicago toward the calm waters of the lake. She slapped him again, and he rootled on back towards his own sad self.
“Fool, you gonna be a daddy. Hear me? I’m pregnant.” He was swimming slowly around his own head now, and he watched from outside as his rancid coke grin congealed. His face was the most horrific thing he’d ever seen. Mascara smeared wearily, lipgloss sheeny as sharkskin, jaunty ragged black felt hat, eyes bombed out like twin Stalingrads. Pudge cheeks and hollow sockets. He looked like a child’s nightmare vision of a gypsy abductor.
“Rask, you hear? I’m pregnant, asshole. Wipe that shit-eating grin off yo stupid-ass face and listen to me. You gonna be daddy to my child.”
“In London.”
Losie paused and then resumed The Posture. “Yeah, okay. In London. Why not?”
“So pack up your shit. We gotta hustle if we want to make tomorrow’s Concorde from JFK.”
She bustled about the room, opening suitcases. Rask stood and stared at himself in the reflection of the window, downtown Chicago steely under a bruised graydark sky. So this is what it was like to be a zombie. Rask considered his condition. Walking, talking, dead inside. Dead maybe forever?
Over the next half hour he used up the remainder of the mean coke and balanced it with a quart of cognac so the elegance of the XXO took the ragged edges off the sour lines.
By the time the taxicab came to take them to O’Hare he was cruising on a soft cloud of indifference. Death wasn’t the worst that could happen to your soul, he thought. There was always being just ordinary, after all.
On the cab radio, Steve Miller exhorted him to Fly Like An Eagle. He nestled in the rancid leatherette of the backseat like an egg reluctant to hatch itself and listened to the soaring words, feeling his wasted time slippin’ slippin’ into the future.
Fly or die, rang the sudden jingle in Rask’s head. Fly - or die. The words rang on through JFK and all the way to Heathrow at twice the speed of sound.
An eagle or a plunging corpse. Fly - or die.
Video Four - “Yer Insides Are Out/Yer Outsides Are In” by A.P. Murphy
Music - “Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey” by The Beatles
I was very curious about the chapter name. Makes perfect sense now