We’re here and there’s nothing you can do about it, their faces say. We’re here and we’re not going to leave.
When they came out onstage, it was dark. The fans had been waiting for almost three hours since the last opening band’s performance. There were Hells Angels everywhere, on the amplifiers and in the middle of the stage, in the front row of the crowd, pushing them back with pool cues and with their motorcycles. Keith bent over his guitar, crouched by the drum kit. They’d heard what it was like from the opening bands, but even now that they could see it for themselves they were still going to try to play their way though it, inured by this point to riots, crowds, warnings, threats. Keith stood upright to hit his first chord, nodding his head. Mick gripped the microphone with both hands, collapsing and rising, collapsing and rising, but by the middle of the first song the stage was so crowded they couldn’t go on. Everyone was looking at a brawl on the ground. Mick stood there in his devil’s suit and top hat, unable to understand what was happening. In his motionless bewilderment, he looked for a moment even younger than he was, a stranded boy in a plastic costume.
“Everybody just cool out,” he said. “Just cool out. Just stop it.”
It was hard to see what was going on from the stage, through the lights. Dogs crossed in front of the microphones. When they started again, they saw girls sitting on their boyfriends’ shoulders, dancing, glitter on their cheeks, smiling or closing their eyes. They saw the raised fists, the shaking heads, and sometimes it almost looked like an ordinary crowd with the usual few scuffles at the edges. They didn’t see the boy pushing his way forward, one of the few black fans in the crowd, dressed in a fedora and a green suit, his girlfriend behind him. They didn’t see it when he brushed against a biker near the stage, not turning around when the biker grabbed his shoulder but readying himself, gathering all the anger of being in this crowd, being black in this white crowd, all of it about to usher in this moment of confrontation. They played an old song about a girl, a pared-down version, bluesy but fast, treble guitars against the batter and crash of high-hat cymbals. The boy in the green suit took one last look at the band, knowing that the bikers had him, and then he drew his gun in a sudden flash, jostled by the crowd so that his raised arm pointed for a brief moment right at Mick.
An empty space suddenly opened up in front of the stage. It got bigger and bigger. For a while no one would go near it. It got so big that Mick could see the grass between the motorcycles, lit up by the footlights, and for a few seconds there was something close to silence. Keith grabbed the microphone, pointing at some bikers who were still swinging their pool cues, demanding that they stop, but it was impossible to see what was happening beyond the reach of the lights. When they started the song again, there was a moment when Mick caught the eye of some boy who implored him to stop, who mouthed the words in a way that was unmistakable, and Mick stood there looking at him, taking in what he was saying, thinking it over. He had not seen the body on the ground, stabbed in the neck, pummeled to death by pool cues, a seventeen-year-old body in a green suit. He started dancing in a frenzy, shaking his whole body, looking right into the other boy’s eyes, defying him. Even then, there were still people cheering, still people with hungry, solemn stares, still people dancing. There were still people trying to get closer to the stage.
Style has an aura that words only diminish. The words follow, trying to explain, but the glamour fades in the glare of opinions and ideas. There is no more Lucifer now, no more Prince of Darkness, no more Angel of Light. There is a return to what was always there before, the silence.
The front door seemed to recede back into the distance as Anger looked at it, making up his mind. He had framed it with newspaper, putting up sheets around the lintel and the jambs, tucking them around the edges and fastening them down with tape. He had covered the doorknob with more tape, and he’d taped the hinges and the sides of the door itself. It looked violated and alive now, a demented shrine. A newspaper picture of Charles Manson stared numbly out at the room, his body slumped to one side, flanked by policemen. There were pictures of Bobby, Susan, Leslie, Tex, Patricia — the girls with their shy, ecstatic smiles, the boys with their thoughtful, intense stares.
He spread some more newspaper on the floor, making an improvised carpet from the doorway to the coffee table. Then he took the first can of paint out of the shopping bag. When he opened it, it looked like oil on top, gold oil that was streaked with lines of dark or gilt specks. He turned it slowly with the wooden stirrer, cross-legged on Mick’s floor, bringing up the pigment until it was burnished into a consistent brownish gold, honey-thick, gleaming in the lamplight.
It would not be something that Mick or any of the others would understand. When they came back, it would just be there: the door painted gold, a kept secret, resonant with silence. Maybe it would seem threatening. Maybe it would seem benign. He didn’t know. He didn’t know if they would think of him right away, or at all.
The paint went on unevenly, sometimes too dark, dense with glitter, sometimes a sticky, almost translucent smear. He went over a thin patch while it was still wet, but the result was streaky and he moved on to another area. It was important to do it precisely. It would take several coats to get the finish right. It had to look like the door had not been painted but had simply materialized, cast in gold. When it was done, he would peel away the tape and the newspapers and pack them up in the shopping bag to take home with him. He would look at what he’d done: the ordinary door transformed, the violation of the break-in softened into something that was not quite a violation at all. The fact that he had done it and not just thought about it would make the moment when he walked through the door last longer than an ordinary moment. It would stay in his mind for a long time, this disappearance, this ambiguous farewell.
It is raining in the theater now. There is the rumble of an explosion, so loud that Bobby can feel it rattling inside his body, pressing at his bones. In front of the screen, Anger’s silhouette strides across the stage in its robe, an image flickering above him, a zodiac glyph, then an image of Mick’s face, singing. There is a flag at one side of the stage, a Nazi flag with a swastika at its center, and Anger lifts it in the air, displaying it, shouting words that Bobby can’t understand. The dream calls for blood. That’s why it has always mattered, why it recurs. There is no end or purpose to it, only greater speed, the pull toward the glistening in the darkness. He lights the flag on fire, holding it away from his body. The music behind him is an adrenaline thud, a racing heartbeat, a dream of violence unfolding in a pink neon haze. Onscreen, Mick and Keith play a song to half a million faceless blips. A biker whispers directives into another biker’s ear. An image of Lucifer begins to coalesce. He is a red curtain over still water, a blue gas flame reflected on chrome, a black sky pocked with green specks of light. He is a dead boy spread-eagled on the ground, his arms tattooed with anchors and skulls, blood in his hair. A plastic skull rotates on a pedestal whose base is the intricately spoked wheel of a motorcycle. It bleeds into a massive image of Anger’s sweating, frenzied face, and as Bobby watches, he knows that this will never end, that neither he nor Anger will ever leave this room.
Projected now is a picture of Bobby himself, sitting cross-legged on a wooden crate, raising his arms in the darkness without knowing why. Patterns of light crawl across his face, generated by a slow strobe held behind a black card punched through with holes. The light bleaches out his features, makes him look even younger than he is. He raises his eyebrows and opens his eyes wide in what might be self-mockery or just an effort to speak. He can’t remember anymore what he would have been trying to say. He can’t remember what it was that he and Anger were trying to accomplish. His image onscreen lifts his arms in the air as if to absolve him of responsibility, or as if to ask what happens next, what he should do.