Might be cannons or an F-18 fly-by.”
Visor, Jeremy thinks. His lip curls. Guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Now intercut with the singer’s face and glimpses of the band are scenes of a house and some young dude’s father showing him an old picture of a soldier, and in the background an American flag is flying from the front porch.
Then the punk goes again:
“I was raised to think my blood’s red, white and blue.
I was raised to do what I was told to do.
Somehow in all that time I never did ask why,
It’s the young men like me who go to kill and die.”
Yeah, well, shit, Jeremy thinks. Get a clue. He believes he needs to sit down, his knees are weak and his stomach feels like it’s got fish swimming in it.
With an explosion of drums, bass and guitar that sounds like a freight train crashing through a building, the scene goes to the face of one of the soldiers on the street and Jeremy sees it’s the kid from the house, and now the herky-jerky shit goes wild because ragheads are shooting from windows and smoke curls up and the supposed soldiers run into another building except for one who goes down on his belly and jerks his legs like he’s hit, and the singer goes:
“When the storm breaks and the rain falls down,
And the mighty laugh with a hollow sound,
We got money for oil, you got battles to fight,
And the heroes come home in the dead of the night.”
Jeremy realizes the chair is empty. As he sinks into it, he is aware that the disturbed air around him smells like the hospital.
He doesn’t know a whole lot about music, but this isn’t bad. It’s got a strong beat. It sounds muscular and hard-assed. The guitars sound like bands of sharp steel flying through the air. There’s a firefight going on between the buildings, and then there’s a blast of flame and tendrils of black smoke whirl up and that, right there, looks pretty real. Then another of the good guys gets shot and claws at his throat and Jeremy leans forward because the shadows in this part are dark.
Everything stops but the drums, and over their thud and rumble the punk growls:
“This was somebody’s child, this was somebody’s dream,
I hope they bury it where the grass is green.”
And a second time, while the drums speak:
“This was somebody’s child, this was somebody’s dream,
I hope they bury it where the grass is green.”
The music swells again, the bass and the guitars come up and so does a trembly organ part that is half tough snarl and half sad murmur. The young guy who’s the hero of the video has somehow lost his helmet, he’s got blood on the side of his face, and around him lie the bodies of his brothers. And then the singer goes:
“I’m not saying this world will ever get along,
Not saying everything is right when it’s so wrong,
But I do believe that war makes some men rich,
And too many of them love that wicked bitch,
When the storm breaks, and the rain falls down…”
And now the young dude has lost it and broken cover, and wild-eyed he crosses the street alone and kicks in a door and nobody’s in there except a figure on the rubbled floor who looks up at him, and the camera shows that it’s an Iraqi kid maybe twelve or thirteen years old, who lifts his arms and crouches against the wall as the soldier raises his rifle and takes aim.
“We got money for oil,
You got battles to fight,
And the heroes come home in the dead of the night.”
The camera backs out of the room and the soldier staggers from the doorway with an expression of shock on his dust-white, blood-streaked face, and he throws his rifle down and begins to run along the street in the direction he came from.
“This was someone’s child, this was someone’s dream,
When the storm breaks,
This was someone’s child, this was someone’s dream,
When the storm, when the storm, storm breaks,
This was someone’s child, this was someone’s dream,
When the storm, when the storm, storm breaks, yeah when it breaks,
This was someone’s child, this was someone’s dream…”
And then the music stops and the punk’s face fills the screen and he sings, in his husky razor-burned voice: “I hope they bury it where the grass is green.”
Fade-in to what Jeremy realizes now is the Felix Gogo Show. He’s seen this a few times, has seen Felix Gogo up on the billboards. Felix Gogo is standing with the band—The Five, is that what they call themselves?—in a room of bright light and black shadows, and behind them on the wall is an American flag. He says they’re going to play at the Curtain Club in Dallas on Saturday night. As Gogo asks them questions, their names come up underneath their faces. Mike Davis talks about his tattoos, and then the camera briefly shows Berke Bonnevey but she doesn’t say anything, and Ariel Collier starts answering a question about how long she’s been a musician, and suddenly the screen breaks apart into multicolored squares like the cable’s about to go out, but the audio’s still going and through a hiss of digital distress he hears the hippie chick say, “I wanted to be a musician so I can tell the truth.”
“What truth?” Gogo asks, a distorted shape on the tormented screen.
“Like this,” she answers, and there’s a weird echo: this…this…this. “The truth about murder,” she says, her image washed-out in a mosaic of pallid green squares.
Then the screen comes back like it ought to be, everything’s fine, and Jeremy sees that Terry Spitzenham is speaking but now the audio is down and nothing is coming from his mouth. The screen ripples and breaks apart again, goes completely to black. The audio lets loose a burst of static and then picks up and the guy is saying, “…what this war’s about is training killers, just a training ground for murder. You know how many kids have been killed by our so-called heroes?”
“Don’t go there,” Jeremy says numbly, to the black screen. “Don’t you go there.”
“Ashamed,” says another voice, crackling with static. “They should all be ashamed, and they all deserve to suffer.”
The picture reappears but everything is gray and ghostly, and the ghostly image of Felix Gogo says in a voice that sounds high-pitched and indignant, “So you want to make people believe our soldiers are shooting kids over there? That for everything they’ve done for this country, every sacrifice they’ve made, you’re making them out to be child-killers?”
Another spirit image flickers in the gloom. Suddenly the picture clears and the singing punk is standing there with a fake smile on his face, and underneath it is the name Nomad—what kind of fucking name is that, anyway?—and he says, very clearly, “We’re working on it.”
“Well, good luck with that,” Felix Gogo replies, and the way he’s said it makes Jeremy know that if Felix had a gun he might have shot that long-haired, smirking bastard on the spot.
Jeremy loses the rest of it, because he’s seen all he wants to see yet he does not have the strength to turn the set off. Where’s the remote, anyway? In the kitchen, or the bathroom? A wave of weary sickness washes over him; he smells his own blood, leaking from the blade-cut on his wrist, dripping into a dark circle on the tan carpet. Now that, he thinks, is going to be one bitch to explain to Mr. Salazar.