Maybe the Leather Skulls were no longer the titans of the death metal scene they used to be in the late eighties. Were they titans then? They had a following, a snug cult of enthusiasts. Their admirers were scarcer now, sure, but as they circled the continent on their latest comeback tour in honor of their eleventh album, The Devils He Casteth Out, the band could still fill bars and small ornate theaters with diehards—haggard bikers and their biker wives, with jazzed up hair and fatal shades of lipstick. The concerts were like nostalgia galas, reenactments of the past. One more spin on the crazy train.
Until the seventh song, the concert at Saint Andrew’s Hall in Detroit was shaping up to be another perfect-fifth night. In their own sludgy way, the band was in sync, the vocals roaring strong. The tribal drumming, punctuated with snare rattles and cymbal chokes, kept the audience on their feet, slithering and pulsing, as if in a compromise between dancing and possession. Too bad, then, for Stefan Nagle, better known as Tex, when he botched the landing of one of his ritual headbanging leaps and tripped from the stage. Smashing into the concrete, Tex would later think better of his martyr attempt to spare the curvaceous body of his Gibson SG. A more minimalist incarnation of the band, with fewer guitar heroics and sonic effects, completed the show. Backstage in the green room, the unscathed members of the Leather Skulls toweled off and sampled the snack platter before herding into the van with a distinctly shattered and grieved Tex. “You look like one of our songs, bro,” said Kent Galloway, known to fans as Voodoo Skank. Ever since the Leather Skulls released their debut album, Forever in Purgatory (Cacophony Records, 1987), music critics have split, some heaping opprobrium on their lavishly macabre lyrics, while others decorated them with praise.
One merciful consequence of Tex’s crash-landing was that it occurred only forty-three miles from where his half sister Erica lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan. By the time Erica got to the hospital in Detroit to see how big brother was doing—not particularly well by all indications—the Leather Skulls were already back on the highway. Since Tex had defiled many a relationship during his rarely sober existence, in most cases past the point of repair, he was dumbstruck at his sister’s invitation to stay with her while he recouped.
“You’re making it hard for me to turn down your offer,” Tex said. “Not like I have full-coverage health insurance.”
“Exactly,” Erica said. “You’re paying rates like you’re in a penthouse suite at the Marriott. Only you don’t have a jacuzzi.”
“No room service either. I don’t know what this button does, but it sure as hell doesn’t call a nurse.”
Which made for an annoying situation a lot of the time because pain had become a recurring feature in Tex’s universe of late. Among the injuries he’d sustained were a fractured kneecap and fractured neck, a bruised rib, and a severe concussion that further scrambled his already thoroughly scrambled brain. Considering where he was just days ago, on stage every night showing off his prowess at guitar, what was happening to him now felt otherworldly, and that other world had to be the one below. Realm of shit, fire, and cruelty. Tex had always resigned himself to his most likely cosmic destiny, but since his fall, weirdly enough, he’d begun to fear the prospect of a damned immortality. It seemed like an odd moment—now that he’d finally kicked alcohol, coke, and intravenous drugs—to once again be taking seriously all his occult imaginings, the “Bloody Sabbath” magick he’d long since dismissed as only another poetic delusion of youth. But during those many restless hours in the hospital when his painkillers and sedatives failed to work, he began to consider whether it might have been some kind of poltergeist or demon who nudged him from the edge of the stage. Maybe that had something to do with why he kept thinking about the pale bluish entity—he knew not what to call it—which R.K. Blumm, the paranormal investigator, had captured on camera in a historic New England prison. The Skulls had used the image for the cover of their concept album Supernaturalia.
Tex gestured to his sister to draw the curtain back. He was leery about the guy in the neighboring bed, frequently observing him eavesdropping on Tex’s conversations. “I’ll be relieved to get out of here,” he whispered to his sister. “Sometimes think they put me in the loony ward.”
“Him? He’s just lonely is all. Doesn’t get any visitors from what I’ve seen.”
Tex knew being lonely could never account for all the skittish symptoms his neighbor suffered from, but then he didn’t bother to reply, already floating away on the memory of a riff. “Welcome Home (Sanitarium)” was a candidate for his favorite Metallica song, certainly up there among the ballads. Despite his foggy state—he figured morphine was allowed this once—he tried to remember the progression of notes. He shut his eyes, letting his sister’s form fade.
When the orderly wheeled in the trolley, Tex surfaced from his musical reverie like a kid whose stereo has suddenly been deactivated by an authority figure. “Fair warning,” he said to his sister. “I eat like a motherfucker when I’m bored.”
“I’ll try to keep something bubbling on the stove. Just don’t start imagining I’m a kitchen prodigy.”
Tex lifted the plastic shield covering his food, sending a wispy wraith coiling to the ceiling. “Yeah, well, I doubt you’ll hear me whining about quality. I’m not exactly used to fine dining.”
Cage fighting. That’s how he spent a lot of his time now, streaming old main events on the net. Hours slid away in a trance of roundhouse kicks, superman punches, and choke holds. Lithe, barefoot fighters trotting through their own splashed blood, determined to sneer at death. Nothing diverted Tex from his pain like the spectacle of somebody else’s.
“What you’re not getting is that cage fighting is an art,” Tex told Erica when she asked why it was so captivating to watch someone suffer on camera.
“You would say that. The most brutal thing is the most artistic in your world. I suppose, to you, murder is the definition of beauty.”
Tex scratched the beard that was beginning to shadow his cheeks and assimilate into his samurai goatee. “Sure is glorious in horror films.”
He watched his sister disappear into the vaguely hostile territory on the far side of the three bedroom. Because of his physical restrictions, Tex hadn’t explored his temporary lodgings much. Though he was sober now, he still felt most like himself in the bombed-out landscapes he used to inhabit—space optimized for tripping and shooting junk. Somewhere with little death’s-head trinkets and ornaments of doom lying about. There was certainly nothing in Erica’s apartment that would have contributed to the atmosphere of a séance, let alone some kind of Ouija-board conjuring.
Erica reappeared stirring a bowl of cookie dough that she’d sanctified with underhanded nutrition, hemp seeds, wildflower honey, little flecks of dark green jelly that resembled locust puree. Not having crossed paths with his sister in a couple of years, Tex was somewhere between envious and admiring of how fit and sculpted she looked at fifty-eight, courtesy, no doubt, of the aerobics classes she taught at the gym. Although he jitterbugged with an eerie vigor when he played with the Skulls, he chalked it up to the demonic voltage of the sound system and his band’s disturbing stage show, namely loops of creepy video from Z-grade film and Voodoo, outdoing even Alice Cooper in his commitment to shocking fans.
“What worries me,” Erica said, “is you losing sight of what you’re supposed to be up to, other than recovering.”
“Remind me what that is again.”
“I’m surprised you haven’t asked for a guitar. I thought you would be going through some kind of withdrawal.”
“Yeah, I shouldn’t have let the band roll out of there without figuring out how to collect my gear. They sure snaked me on that one. You wouldn’t think Andy from Alien Dominatrix would want to play somebody else’s guitar, but then my SG is custom made. You just can’t wrench a sound like that from the pale soul of factory equipment.”
Erica stopped revolving her wooden spoon and plucked a strand of hair out of her eyes. “Alien Dominatrix, huh? What are they like?”
“Ever listen to Resurrected Alligator?”
“Not that I recall.”
“Gorgon Popsicle Exploder?”
“Nope.”
“The Banana Sex Doll Circus?”
“Afraid not, but it’s starting to sound like I’m missing out.”
“Yeah, well, Andy’s band is part of that whole slime grunge scene with elements of robot punk and new wave schizoid industrialism. The Skulls have always been thrash bloodcore avant-gardists rooted in chainsaw death metal, borrowing heavily from vampire ska and traditional cock rock.”
Other than the cage fights, Tex occupied himself a lot like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, spying on neighbors, using the camera on his Android as a telescope. Only problem was there wasn’t a lot of payoff to his new hobby: he was never lucky enough to catch anything scandalous or lewd, let alone homicidal. Instead, he gazed pointlessly at a woman in her sixties with a short bob of silver hair while she mutated through a series of serpentine postures on her yoga mat or dusted around the feet of her grand piano. It only took a few days at the window before the woman started to keep her blinds shuttered, even when the sun was up. Then there was nothing much left to observe but the bland rigamarole of a Chinese takeout restaurant. Tex, though, had long been endowed with a weird and, some would say, perverted fantasy life, and where most would struggle to see anything more than money change hands for cartons of lo mein and kung pao beef, Tex was convinced that at least some of the mysterious brown bags that left the restaurant concealed the dismembered body parts of someone executed on assignment.
In the late evening, around the time the Leather Skulls would be taking the stage, Tex pulled up his digital calendar, trying to picture the depraved bar or misfit haunt where they were booked. In London, Ontario, they were gigging at the Punisher Lounge. In Toronto, the band was playing at the Labatt’s Hockey and Video Emporium for the monthly occasion known as “Thrash Night.” In Buffalo, New York, they were penciled in for a private affair, a sixtieth birthday party for the now retired Jens Lundgren of the hillbilly prog metal outfit Elf Underworld.
Now that he was denied the catharsis of performance, Tex found some faint consolation in trying to guess the set list. He was back in his superstitious mode, looking for tarot-card symbolism, gnostic convergences with the truth. He knew they had to be opening, like always, with “The Stabbing at Whispering Valley Lake,” which began, like a lot of their songs, with chugging guitars, a detuned bass droning away, double-kick thundering on the drums, one of Voodoo Skank’s psychotic wails, and an overall noise and distortion level capable of inducing PTSD. From there, it was an easy transition into “Crypt of the Unrepentant,” the closest thing to a Skulls’ popular hit. As for the third song, Tex’s oracle powers usually failed him. After those two reliable entry points, the night could fork in myriad ways. Every show was its own multiheaded beast.
Occasionally, he would check his guesses in the answer key of a fan’s blog or social media post, and at some point in his web-search sleuthing he noticed a gaping omission. Ever since Tex had been laid up in the hospital, the Skulls had stopped playing “Zombie Bat Mitzvah,” a rare Tex original featuring the band’s only attempt at gothic klezmer. He was protective of his song. Most of the band’s repertoire was controlled by the duo of Voodoo and the bassist, Blaise Calvero, which functioned like a Lennon-McCartney, a juggernaut forcing Tex (guitar, backing vocals), Myles Meager (drums, tablas), and Damon “The Sodomite” Leonard (synthesizer, hurdy-gurdy, electric fiddle) to fight like rabid dogs over the bone of the remaining tracks. Not even a single blog post showed any sign that “Zombie” had been included in any recent sets.
Getting himself worked up to the point where it interfered with what little fun there was to be had in his window voyeurism, Tex sent his band’s lead growler a text message.
“Fuck no we’re not playing it,” Voodoo wrote back. “Who likes that song except the kind of meatheads who think Judas Priest is a Christian band? Not really the crowd we want to encourage!”
No follow-up to inquire about his convalescence? Well, that Voodoo had insulted him was only natural. The preservation of his menacing mystique required him to be an asshole to basically everyone. Still, in the evening, indifferent to the John Carpenter film he’d selected—those cinematic massacres were too familiar to offer any fresh delight—he muted the demented score and composed another terse essay of a text. This time he warned his band’s lead vocalist of certain “reforms” he wanted to implement when he returned to the tour. Voodoo should not only expect “Zombie” to be reinstated, the band would soon be thrashing to offbeat Tex compositions like “Eight Chained Orangutans” too. He rounded out the threat with some aggressive emojis and hit send with a violence that caused his archaic Android to freeze for some minutes before it obliged.
That night, Tex was enjoying himself in collaboration with a photo gallery of the latest blonde prom queen of the triple-X circuit when, above the glistening crevasse of surgically augmented breasts, the message icon bloomed. “Over the years I’ve gotten accustomed to your hissy fits and teenage tantrums,” Voodoo wrote. “In case you didn’t realize I’m in no mood to weather the shitstorm anymore! We’re in a groove with Dominatrix Andy. So, this just might be the moment to go fuck yourself? Maybe even permanently?”
Tex went back to his gallery of carnal images alright, but the fire in the sin was gone. No matter how many times he clicked on gleaming flesh, the animal in him stayed away.
His sister materialized in his bedroom strumming a G major chord on an acoustic guitar.
Tex writhed under the blankets. “Next time how about obeying the closed-door policy,” he said. “An old fart like me needs to capitalize on his beauty sleep.”
Erica, already a veteran when it came to shirking off Tex’s gripes, shifted her finger pattern to an open E. “Sounds okay to my untrained ears.”
She handed the guitar to Tex, and he examined the headstock. A Fender Squier, too squeaky and shiny-toned for his tastes. He would have far preferred an electric, of course. Give him his axe any day—and while you’re at it, toss in a Marshall amplifier and a wah-wah pedal—but if the devil could only spare an acoustic, couldn’t he have painted it black? Could you generate the raging stampede of thrash with a guitar that had the color of a frozen yogurt flavor? Iridescent turquoise? Still trying to be a good sport about it, he strummed his way through the intro of “Elevator Music to Hades,” another Tex original, but he barely got through a dozen jerky quarter tones before he shut down the attempt.
“Intonation’s a little strange,” he said. “But I can adjust it with some tools. Where’d you get this thing?”
“A friend of mine. A trainer at the gym. He’s one of those dudes who has turned his whole basement into a guitar museum. Said he didn’t mind lending it to me when I told him who you are.”
“A Skulls fan?”
“He knew of you guys. Apparently, the guitarist of Nuclear Worm cited your band as an influence.”
“Yeah, figures. That’s their way of throwing flowers on our grave. It wouldn’t matter if they sent a Christmas card. Last thing I want to be considered is a forerunner to torture funk.”
“Too hardcore even for you?”
“God no.” Tex struck a power chord and spidered up the neck for some triplets. “From what I can tell, there isn’t a lot more to Nuclear Worm than corpse paint and white noise.”
For reasons he had no insight into, his sister wanted to hang around and, after a few blues scales that Tex’s chops could cope with, he was again feeling under pressure to pump out tunes more advanced than you’d get in your first few lessons at a music school. Slayer’s “Mandatory Suicide” always made for a festive campfire sing-along in the circles he patronized, but he doubted his ability to remember all the bridges and segues, let alone keep up with the sabertooth speed. He tried a couple of licks, utilizing a tremolo picking technique. It was slow and sloppy work. He was a long way from seeing his fans moshing, giving him the sign of the horns while he shredded in the footlights.
Even though his reunion with music wasn’t an instantaneous success, Tex soldiered on with the discipline of daily finger exercises. Well, for about a week, he did. Then his progress got a lot bumpier and more sporadic.
In the past, he’d always felt music to be a dangerously seductive force. His guitar was not only an advertisement for his sexual fitness, the music itself was erotic. The primitive rumble of the beat set the bedroom mood. As his fingers slid up the frets in a sequence of pulses and vibrato throbs, he took inspiration from his visits to strip bars and Peeping Tom booths, the unsnared braziers and panties whirling, ladies pressing up to the glass with their tongues.
Nowadays, when he picked up the guitar, the staccato attack of pain intervened. The simplest drills, tracing out the octaves, working his way across the neck in a series of chromatic runs, was enough to activate trauma he carried in his body, pain gyrating through his fingers and joints. If he hadn’t been playing acoustic, he might have guessed his guitar had electrocuted him. Often, he’d barely muddled through his warm-up and had not even invoked the sinister tritone progressions of his favored genre before he’d be forced to return the instrument to its tortoise-shell case.
Being a metalhead and a connoisseur of any style that trafficked in nightmare—it’s not as though he was the most ravenous Beatles fan. They’d teased him with “Helter Skelter” and “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” but most of their canon had a nauseating, uplifting effect. Yet, he was now coming around to “When I’m Sixty-Four.” The melody was upbeat, but it still seemed to him the song was on target in its basic assumptions. Despite all the comeback tours, the serial revivalism of ACDC and the Rolling Stones, the undead army of so many bandanna-wearing rockers, tatted and toothless men periodically rising from their graves—or their Malibu villas—to croon through the world’s hockey arenas and football stadiums, angst does have an ending, and it tends to wither up long before the body does. In the scramble for money and recognition, these old icons were subverting their legacies, spilling blood on their white ballroom gowns.
Maybe it was really felicity in disguise that heaved Tex from the stage. He and his bandmates should have wrapped up their careers earlier. They should have kept silent, instead of confusing everybody with one more desperate scream to draw attention to their fading selves.
By the time the Leather Skulls had rode down to the beachy limit of Florida, Tex’s condition improved to where he could have his cast stripped away. Before long, he was outdoors again, sucking in the pine-scented air, hobbling around with a cane. Usually, fine weather made him feel superfluous and out of place. It was annoying to admit that this year, after the privation of his confinement, the sight of dogs—even that of small perky ones, whom he typically despised—was somehow reassuring to him.
On one of his wanderings in the neighborhood, he entered a park. Here he walked past rows of yellow carnations to a knoll where he came upon an event that startled his languishing artistic sensibility out of its daze. A boy in his late adolescence was putting on a puppet show for a group of small children and toddlers. The show featured seven characters made from socks and simple raw materials, and the puppeteer was able to distinguish them by means of a tall hat or snaky nose and a signature way of trotting or dancing across the miniature stage. The puppets might have been more bare-bones than Jim Henson’s psychedelic troupe, but the pantomime sketch that evolved touched on many of the venerable themes that have attended drama since its sunrise in the ancient world. A few of the children’s mothers, their hair threaded through the back of their baseball caps, hobnobbed in front of a fold-up table and dispensed iced fruit punch into plastic cups. Although Tex found his throat was parched from his long, nomadic journey through the suburbs, he preferred not to bother any of the mothers by asking for a drink. Still, he managed to insinuate himself into the gathering, sitting down at a bench at the edge of the knoll.
He joined the audience in laughter and applause as the heroic sock outwitted his rival’s machinations and claimed the prize of a Venus with freckles and golden braids. When all the children sprang up from the blue shadows of the grass, Tex made his slow way to the boy ventriloquist. “That’s a five-star show and no doubt about it,” he said. “You’ve got a helluva talent there, kid.”
The little master of puppets was a slight boy with sandy hair messily arranged in a swoop. He offered Tex a bashful smile, shrugging, then withdrew a couple of steps.
“Here’s the thing though,” Tex said. “I can tell you’re pretty green as an artist. You better realize there are people who will want to screw with you. You’re going to have to wise up at some point or you’ll be taken in by their manipulation.”
The boy crouched down and began dismantling his theater. “I’m just doing this on the weekend until I go to camp,” he said.
Tex wished he could defy his sober vow and fire up a joint. Instead, he crammed three sticks of spearmint gum into his mouth. “Is it your idea to go to camp?” he asked. “Because if it’s not—if you’ve got an asshole stepfather forcing you to go, for instance, and you’d rather hang around the city with your puppets . . . well, maybe then you should speak up about it. It’s a lot better than lying down and taking it.”
The boy set his puppets one by one inside the velour interior of the trunk.
“Did you hear what I said? Or are you going to go all sissy on me?”
“There’s a donation cup for my show on that table,” the boy said, pointing.
“Yeah, and I’ll pay you when you answer me. Never mind, I don’t have cash.”
The boy looked up coldly. “Then I guess you have no further reason to talk to me.”
“So now we come to it. You’re just another businessman with a cute face, and all this shit,” Tex tapped his cane on the boy’s trunk, “this is supposed to be your ticket, huh? You want to be loved and cuddled, and you want all the big contracts on top of it.”
The boy shut the latches on his trunk and dragged it out of the Goliath shadow the aging metalhead cast.
Tex stood alone, as if in the center of a stage in some forlorn music hall. The adults surrounding him all seemed to have that unmistakable mixture of parental caution and venom in their eyes. And yet, wasn’t he the one attempting an act of charity? An exorcism on their behalf? Though soft and evasive as individuals, as a crowd they represented a dim but impending threat, like violent weather that required time to accumulate and converge. His head swam through a delirium of rotten colors and floating stars. Even the impartial trees assumed a perilous aspect.
One of the dads approached him, gently enough, asking him if he was having some kind of medical event.
“Is talking to Satan a medical event? Leave me alone, you’ve got enough of your own problems, you son of a bitch.”
Tex was almost whole again, physically, but the Leather Skulls were getting farther away. He no longer kept track of the band’s progress through the continent, and he no longer tried to guess the songs they might be playing. Voodoo was right to mock him for the idea of wanting to resurrect his old bungled creations. Death metal compositions should never accommodate whimsy. In the darkest phase of his band’s career, from Court of Iscariot (Nighthawk Records, 1989) until The Decapitation Ceremony (Bondage Sound, 1996), had they ever stooped to dalliance and frivolity? If there was any jester’s spirit in the band, it had yielded to the grace of wickedness.
Once again his sister ignored the warning protocols he thought they’d established, forcing her way into his room. “Is that a romance novel?” she asked.
Tex looked at the cover of the book he was reading, more like flipping through, for the occasional scintillating passage. “I picked it up at a garage sale. It’s just a dumb thing to read. I’d sooner have a horror or true crime novel.”
“So you quit watching those UFC matches?”
“Seen them all,” he said. “Sucked all the life out of them I could.”
“You never feel the urge to play a song on guitar?”
“I broke a string. What is this? Are you beginning to feel sorry you let me stay with you? Want to kick my ass out?”
“No. I wanted to ask if you’d mind me inviting a friend over tonight,” Erica said.
“What kind of friend? A woman?”
“His name is Matthew. I’ve told you about him.”
Tex inserted a torn shoelace to mark his place in the book. “The guy you’re dating? Why do you have an evil grin?”
“Do I? You don’t have to think of this as some territorial—”
“Matthew’s coming to slay me and take my spot.”
“We’re going to have dinner, maybe a beer. Real caj.”
“You two will be having a beer. I’ll be sticking with bubbly water.”
Tex didn’t have anything fresh to wear, and he could not conceive of any valid reason to have a shower in preparation for the appearance of Matthew. If he tied his hair back, it was only because he wasn’t fond of it falling into his face while he ate.
Matthew’s laughter immediately disposed Tex to dislike him, a kind of horsey rhythm to it, very undignified. He was wearing a frilly cowboy shirt that smacked of a certain unforgivable peacocking. “Quite the honor,” Matthew said, shoving a hand in Tex’s vicinity. “Should I call you Tex or Stefan?”
“Friends call me Tex, but you can call me whatever.”
“He’s joking,” Erica said. “My brother’s known to be a joker.”
“How did you get the name Tex?” Matthew asked. “Because you’re not from Texas, right?”
“It comes down to something I did in Texas. The band was on its first ever tour.”
“Was it some kind of prank?”
Tex turned to his sister. She was wearing a black halter top and gold hoop earrings and had tinkered with her eyelashes in a way that made her look exotic, vaguely “Arabian Nights.”
“I shouldn’t tell him about that so early into a dinner party,” Tex said.
“Something sick happened in Texas,” Erica said. “Just fill in the blank with the sickest thing you can imagine. You won’t be far off the mark.”
“I’ll give you a hint,” Tex said. “It involves a rabbit.”
“He’s messing with you again,” Erica said.
“I don’t got to know.” Matthew raised his hands up like he was surrendering himself to an imprisonment. “I accept it on good credit. You guys were one of the most hellish bands, so goes the legend. I expect any party tricks you did in the day would put guys like me to shame.”
From then on, Tex started to slacken in his attitude to young Matthew. The kid was an honest cavalier. Matthew’s hair was mostly gray, but he was a kid alright, hardly fifty, still looking as if he had loads of vinegar in him, a nimble human being who can sit at the computer punching numbers. Doing whatever people did at desks in those tall, lighted sarcophagi of the downtown.
Tex was pleased to learn they’d be having meat. And not just the pale chickens that frosted over in vats at the grocery store either. Elk meat. Jewel of the hunter.
“Who was it that did the gaming?”
“Shot it myself,” Matthew said. “A buddy of mine skinned it, and here we are. From woods to plate with no stops along the way.”
“It’s been a damn hungry eon since I’ve eaten any fresh kills. If you’re a hunter then you’ve got my approval.”
“Means a lot coming from you.”
“I admire anyone who can get close to death and not flinch away. Balls are what’s lacking in this culture.”
“He means balls symbolically,” Erica said.
“Courage is what’s lacking. This is the secret people don’t understand. Death metal makes one courageous because there’s something in the music terrifying enough to scare off death. Of course, there are no guarantees. If you’ve got shit on your conscience, metal sends you on your way. You run from it like a child from darkness.”
“I hear you,” Matthew said, “and I respect the hell out of you being on the road, the kind of stuff you must have seen. Must make you feel like you’ve lived a thousand years to everyone else’s ten.”
“How much creepy male bonding are you going to be doing tonight?” Erica said. She was in the kitchen shredding a purple head of cabbage on a mandolin for a salad. “Dinner is almost ready if one of you lion tamers would humble yourself enough to put out cutlery.”
Later, with an expanded belly and an afterglow from the feast, Tex paid his disciple the honor of sitting with him for another hour of Q and A. Matthew kept on fishing for scabrous anecdotes about former bandmates and other derelict characters they encountered along the road. Sometimes Tex embellished a detail as if he were an undertaker and the aim was to render the dead person as faultless in repose as a painted doll. But mainly he told it straight, in the tradition of the old storyteller, invoking reality without too much finery attached.
Matthew, who was reclining on an easy chair, sat up and suddenly looked clear-eyed, like he’d received an omen from God. “I was hoping, if you’re not too tired, we could listen to metal together. We could listen to your band or another one who inspired you, and you could maybe offer some insight. Like a coach’s corner.”
“We could do that. But we have a problem. My sister can’t stand my kind of music.”
“That’s not true. You’ve never tried me.”
“I’ve told you already. You don’t have the right speakers for it. You need to listen to metal fucking loud. It’s the devil’s music. The best of it makes you believe in the reality of hell. It’s no use bothering, if you’re going to be sheepish about it.”
“I have a good sound system in my cabin,” Matthew said. “We can go there some time— maybe next weekend? If Tex will indulge me.”
“Well, I’ll probably be back on the road by then. I’m almost healed up. I barely need this thing,” Tex said, reaching for his cane, “and I’m eager to pick up with the band. From what I hear, they’re desperate to put me back in the lineup so they can ditch the punk they have filling in.”
He limped off to bed. The exertion of conversation had sapped life from his body, and his movements were jittery, as if he’d relapsed to an earlier moment in his recovery, sooner after his fall. When he got to his room, he could hear the faint talk of his sister and Matthew.
“Don’t bring that up again, about listening to metal together,” Erica said. “He won’t want to do that.”
“Why not if he had the time?”
“He just wouldn’t. He’s given up on music. The hard stuff anyway.”
Tex plugged his ears with tissue the way he sometimes saw prudent fans do at his shows, then stripped down to his body art and swallowed an Advil that tasted like candy. Outside, the thrumming of rain on the roofs of cars was only imagery to him, and even the heavier downpour that followed was no more than a gentle hissing. He stacked three pillows into a pile so when he fell asleep it would be like nodding off on a bale of hay in the open sky. He would read his way there, floating along from book to dream, from melody to sleep, with no dead notes to haunt him through the passage.