But in the meantime there were fireworks.
By the last tune in the set the electricity was so thick in the club that—as Mose had said once, with a rocker’s melodrama—“If you could cut it, it would bleed.” The dope and smashweed and tobacco smoke moiling the air seemed to conspire with the stage lights to create an atmosphere of magical apartness. With each song-keyed shift in the light, red to blue to white to sulfurous yellow, a corresponding emotional wavelength rippled through the room. The energy built, and Rickenharp discharged it, his Strat the lightning rod.
And then the set ended.
Rickenharp bashed out the last five notes alone, nailing a climax onto the air. Then he walked offstage, hardly hearing the roar from the crowd. He found himself half running down the white, grimy plastibrick corridor, and then he was in the dressing room and didn’t remember coming there. The graffiti seemed to writhe on the walls as if he’d taken a psychedelic. Everything felt more real than usual. His ears were ringing like Quasimodo’s belfry.
He heard footsteps and turned, working up what he was going to say to the band. But it was the chaotichick and someone else, and then a third dude coming in after the someone else.
The someone else was a skinny guy with brown hair that was naturally messy, not messy as part of one of the cultural subcurrents. His mouth hung a little ajar, and one of his incisors was decayed black. His nose was windburned and the back of his bony hands were gnarled with veins. The third dude was Japanese; small, brown-eyed, nondescript, his expression was mild, just a shade more friendly than neutral. The skinny Caucasian guy wore an army jacket sans insignia, shiny jeans, and rotting tennis shoes. His hands were nervous, like there was something he was used to holding in them that wasn’t there now. An instrument? Maybe.
The Japanese guy wore a Japanese Action Suit—surprise, surprise—sky-blue and neat as a pin. There was a lump on his hip—something he could reach by putting his right arm across his body and through the open zipper down the front of the suit—and Rickenharp was pretty sure it was a gun.
There was one thing all three of them had in common: they looked half-starved.
Rickenharp shivered—his gloss of sweat cooling on him, but he forced himself to say, “Whusappnin’?” It was wooden in his mouth. He was looking past them, waiting for the band.
“Band’s in the wings,” the chaotichick said. “The bass player said to tell you… well it was Telm zassouter.”
Rickenharp had to smile at her mock of Julio’s technicki. Tell him, get his ass out here.
Then some of the druggy feeling washed away and he heard the shouts from the audience and he realized they wanted an encore.
“Jeez, an encore,” he said without thinking. “Been so fucking long.”
“’Ey mate,” the skinny guy said, pronouncing mate like mite. Brit or Aussie. “I saw you at Stone’enge five years ago when you ’ad yer second ’it.”
Rickenharp winced a little when the guy said your second hit, inadvertently underlining the fact that Rickenharp had had only two, and everyone knew he wasn’t likely to have any more.
“I’m Carmen,” the chaotichick said. “This is Willow and Yukio.” Yukio was standing sideways from the others, and something about the way he did it told Rickenharp he was watching down the corridor without seeming to.
Carmen saw Rickenharp looking at Yukio and said, “Cops are coming down.”
“Why?” Rickenharp asked. “The club’s licensed.”
“Not for you or the club. For us.”
He looked at her and said, “Hey, I don’t need to get busted…” He picked up his guitar and went into the hall. “I got to do my encore before they lose interest.”
She followed along, into the hall and the echo of the encore stomps, and asked, “Can we hang out in the dressing room for a while?”
“Yeah, but it ain’t sacrosanct. You come back here, the cops can, too.” They were in the wings now. Rickenharp signaled to Murch and the band started playing.
Standing beside him, she said, “These aren’t exactly cops. They probably don’t know these kind of places, they’d look for us in the crowd, not the dressing room.”
“You’re an optimist. I’ll tell the bouncer to stand here, and if he sees anyone else start to come back, he’ll tell ’em it’s empty back here ’cause he just checked. Might work, might not.”
“Thanks.” She went back to the dressing room. He spoke to the bouncer and went on stage. Feeling drained, the guitar heavy on him. But he picked up on the energy level in the room and it carried him through two encores. He left them wanting more—and, sticky with sweat, walked back to his dressing room.
They were still there. Carmen, Yukio, Willow.
“Is there a stage door?” Yukio asked. “Into alley?”
Rickenharp nodded. “Wait in the hall; I’ll come out and show you in a minute.”
Yukio nodded, and they went into the hall. The band came in, filed past Carmen and Yukio and the Brit without much noticing them, assuming they were backstage hangout flotsam, except Murch stared at Carmen’s tits and swaggered a bit, twirling his drumsticks.
The band sat around laughing in the dressing room, slapping palms, lighting several kinds of smokes. They didn’t offer Rickenharp any; they knew he didn’t use it.
Rickenharp was packing his guitar away, when Mose said, “You blew good.”
“You mean he gave you a good head?” Murch said, and Julio snickered.
“Yeah,” Ponce said, “the guy gives a good head, good collarbone, good kidneys—”
“Good kidneys? Rick sucks on your kidneys? I think I’m gonna puke.”
And the usual puerile band banter because they were still high from a good set and putting off what they knew had to come, till Rickenharp said, “What you want to talk about, Mose?”
Mose looked at him, and the others shut up.
“I know there’s something on your mind,” Rickenharp said softly. “Something you haven’t come out with yet.”
Mose said, “Well, it’s like—there’s an agent Ponce knows, and this guy could take us on. He’s a technicki agent and we’d be taking on a technicki circuit, but we’d work our way back from there, that’s a good base. But this guy says we have to get a wire act in.”
“You guys been busy,” Rickenharp said, shutting the guitar case.
Mose shrugged, “Hey, we ain’t been doing it behind your back; we didn’t hear from the guy till yesterday night. We didn’t have a real chance to talk to you till now, so, uh, we have the same personnel but we change costumes, change the band’s name, write new tunes.”
“We’d lose it,” Rickenharp said. Feeling caved-in. “We’d lose the thing we got, doing that shit, because it’s all superimposed.”
“Rickenharp—rock ’n’ roll is not a fucking religion,” Mose said.
“No, it’s not a religion, it’s a way of life. Now, here’s my proposaclass="underline" we write new songs in the same style as always. We did good tonight. It could be the beginning of a turnaround for us. We stay here, build on the base audience we established tonight.”
It was like throwing coins into the Grand Canyon. You couldn’t even hear them hit bottom.
The band just looked back at him.
“Okay,” Rickenharp said. “Okay. We’ve been through this ten fucking times. Okay. That’s all.” He’d had an exit speech worked out for this moment, but it caught in his throat. He turned to Murch and said, “You think they’re going to keep you on, they tell you that? Bullshit! They’ll be doing it without a drummer, man. You better learn to program computers, fast.” Then he looked at Mose. “Fuck you, Mose.” He said it quietly.