“You just passing through, or what?” Nomad asked, unable to keep a grin off his face.
“There’s the kid!” said the blonde-haired man, in a raspy growl that used to be known by the millions and imitated by dozens of lesser vocalists. He stood up, matched Nomad’s grin and opened his arms wide, permitting entrance. “Come on over here, you little motherfucker!”
The man was wearing only a black Speedo and brown sandals. The lump at his crotch was huge. Nomad said, “I’m not getting any nearer to that thing.”
“It’s been tamed,” the man said. “Hey, I’m not wasting it on you. Come on, gimme a hug.”
Nomad walked forward. Suddenly the long-haired man with the black Speedo and the huge crotch-log crouched over and rushed him. In the next instant a shoulder as hard as reinforced concrete hit Nomad before he could brace himself. He staggered back. He would have gone down had not the buttery-haired bastard grabbed him around the waist to keep him from falling. Then he swung Nomad around like a ragdoll and neatly set him down in the lawn chair.
Thor Bronson gave an explosive cat squall of a laugh into Nomad’s face. “That’s for fucking my mind, Johnny! I thought I was opening for you tonight! How come I’m not?”
“Ow! Jesus! You trying to break my ribs?”
“I ought to break your ass! Come ’ere, I love ya!” Thor grabbed the back of Nomad’s neck and gave him a big wet kiss right on the forehead. “You little shit, you never heard of email?” A shadow passed over his face; the half-crazed grin slid away and the emerald eyes darkened. “About Mike and George. Oh man oh man, is that a bad scene. Who the fuck is Jeremy Pett and what did you do to him?”
“You saw that on TV?”
“Every fucking station. For a while. Then the world spun on. Did you know the fucking Duct Tape Rapist nailed somebody I used to date? A secretary at Rhino Records. Man, I do not like the way things are headed. Beer. You want a beer? Sure you do.”
“No beer,” Nomad said. He saw a pack of Winstons and a lighter on a little table next to the chair. “I’ll take a cigarette and some bottled water, if you’ve got it.”
“Light it up. Let me go get another chair.” Thor went into the trailer, leaving Nomad sitting alone in the harsh sun. Nomad got his cigarette going. In another minute Thor came back out, gripping two bottles of beer by the necks and carrying a second lawn chair under his arm. He handed Nomad one of the cold brews and set up his own chair. “Hey, we can’t have a pale pussy like you getting a little sunburned!” he said. “Here you go.” He reached over into a plastic bin and brought out a large red-striped umbrella, which had a rubber vise-grip on the handle. He opened the umbrella and screwed the grip to one of Nomad’s armrests so his guest would be sitting in the shade.
“Comforts of home,” Thor said. He sat down and clinked his bottle against Nomad’s. They both drank, and then Thor stretched his wiry legs out and uptilted his sun-lined, rough-weathered face to the celestial Sol.
Nomad’s gaze slipped toward the man on his right and then away again. He took another drink. He hadn’t seen Thor in a couple of years; the last time had been at an outdoor festival in Santa Cruz in June of 2006. Thor was about forty-five years old, give or take. His website said he’d been born in 1963, but that was up for debate. His website also said his own musical influences growing up as a rebellious kid in Bayonne, New Jersey included Judas Priest, Blue Oyster Cult, Mountain, Black Sabbath and of course Led Zeppelin, with special props to Mark Farner of Grand Funk Railroad, Peter Wolf of the J. Geils Band, and Jim Dandy of Black Oak Arkansas. That part was true, but Thor Bronson was a fiction.
He’d been born Saul Brightman to a father named Maury, also known as ‘The Lighthouse’. Many beers, tequila shots and spliffs of whackyweed had gone into these revelations, drawn out over the course of several months when John Charles had been a hanger-on and band wannabe in Hollywood in 1997. At age 18, Nomad had taken the bus from Detroit with great expectations of quickly finding a band and making his mark; within a couple of weeks he was walking the streets looking for any place to play, living on chili dogs and crashing in a dumpy apartment on North Mariposa Avenue with four other big shots like himself. He had finally found semi-steady work as a house painter. And lucky to get that, too. But he had wound up painting an apartment for a young woman in Hermosa Beach who, when she’d found out he wanted to be a musician, had told him her sister was dating an “old guy” who used to be somebody famous in music. Like he was named after that dude in the comic book, that guy with the helmet and the horns.
That guy was playing on Saturday night at the Addiction in Downey, and maybe if a girl could get a discount from her handsome painter there might be an introduction?
That guy was on the cover of many of the old records John Charles had left behind in his teenaged bedroom, in there along with the Aerosmith, AC/DC, Guns N’ Roses and Motley Crue vinyl. That guy used to take the stage with his heavy-metal band, him with his long flowing Nordic-blonde hair, his bared chest thrust out to the world, his body lean and ripped and his voice “a dark broth of pure grimy rock mixed with black-lacquered soul mixed with red mud field hollers mixed with the primal scream of urban desperation”.
That had been straight from the back copy of Mjöllnir’s first album, Hit It, which had done some monster sales, especially in Germany, Norway and Sweden.
“They’ll find the sonofabitch,” Thor said after another swig of beer. “Nobody gets away clean these days. They’ll find him on a satellite picture or something.”
“Yeah, they probably will,” Nomad agreed.
“I like it hot,” Thor said, and then he grinned at Nomad because the Bleeding Brains had come to the end of a song and up rose the ragged voices of the multitude, the throng, the infernal engine that kept the wheels of rock ’n roll on the burning rails to Hell. The voices, hundreds strong, merged together into a mass of knotted noise and came rolling across the lot behind the stage like the thunder of a medieval siege machine. “Listen…listen,” said Thor. Nomad saw him close his eyes for a few seconds as if he were hearing a choir of angels, be they however deranged. The sound rolled over them and past, and before it was gone The Bleeding Brains’ drummer started pounding his bass and two guitars shredded the air as they fought for supremacy.
“New band,” Thor told him. “Young dudes, scared shitless. I told the lead singer that if he ever felt things getting out of control, he ought to drop his jeans and moon the crowd. Nothing like an asshole on display to show ’em who’s in charge of the party.”
“I think you gave me the same advice.”
“I guess I did, huh?” Thor turned his chair slightly so he could face the kid, which was what he’d always called John Charles. Where’s the kid with my fucking water? Where’s the kid with the fucking Phillips screwdriver? Where’s the kid with the fucking electrical tape?
That’s what John Charles was, at first: the gofer, unfit as yet to move speakers and carry equipment alongside the guys who’d been with Mjöllnir for years. He had started at the bottom of the crazy birdcage, where all the shit dropped down on a young punk’s feathers.
“How’re you doing?” Thor asked him. “Really.”
Nomad could’ve asked Thor the same question. His old friend—the first person who’d given him a chance to show what he could do, after that long hard summer of grunt work—was looking much older than his years. But then, rock years were like dog years. Thor had been an iron-pumping brute in his prime; now he was more shrivelled than ripped. Coiled around the remains of his biceps were bands of jagged black tattoos. Over his heart and much of his left shoulder was the black-and-red tattoo of the Viking symbol for Mjöllnir, topped with a skull. He hadn’t had those adornments until he’d needed them to stay current. True, he could still knock Nomad sprawling, yet he seemed thin and diminished. Knots and veins stood out under the burnished, sunfreckled skin. The hair plugs were showing in the front, the dreaded “doll’s-hair” effect. His expensive set of teeth had worn down, like those of an old lion that has chewed up too many calcified bones. But he still had the gleaming green eyes, and he still had The Look, and with those two things alone you could go a long, long way.