Dark Screams: Volume Two (12 page)

D
ECEMBER 20,1974

G. G. Wall swears it’s true.

“I guess it was like some metaphor. You know, outwardly represented. It was strange.”

He claims the child would simply bleed. Instead of tears, blood would run down her eight-year-old face, and stain her dress red. Otherwise, she remained expressionless, hands folded calmly in her lap, flies sipping on her cheeks.

“I don’t see how they could’ve faked it. But people came from all over, just fascinated. They felt sorrow and remorse. But they also seemed to feel an odd sense of relief.”

He thinks that maybe it helped them work through their own pain and quiet tortures. The girl never left the chair, for the several hours she was on view. Never spoke.

“It gets fucking hot in Italy that time of year, too…it was summer, you know? And her parents just forced her to sit there in that white dress while folks lined up and walked by.”

He begins to dislike the memory.

“We were on tour, all through Europe. Played Italy for a couple weeks. I went to see her every day.”

Silence.

“After a few days, I started to feel ashamed. Watching her like that. I don’t know what it meant or why it picked her, but it was wrong what we all did…” He looks out from the Eiffel, studying nothing, lost in Paris as huge painting.

It’s been two years since Whatever played Italy. Wall says word is, the girl continues to bleed.

M
ARCH 19,1972

“And now the song that’s skinning the charts alive…Whatever’s ‘Yeah, Right,’ a tantrum anthem which seems to have taken the fevered temperature of an entire generation. Pete Townshend: take notes.”

This deal is crap,

I want my mommy.

My mantra died.

Page my swami.

Is this a joke?

Who’s in charge?

They brought me small,

I asked for large.

I’m having no fun,

I’ve lost my zip.

Where’s the laughs?

Life’s a gyp.

It’s not like it was.

The beer is flat.

The sun is cold.

I smell a rat.

Leave me for dead,

I’ll be fine.

There’s nothing left.

But it’s all mine.

Cut my throat,

Watch me gush.

Don’t cry, baby.

Enjoy the rush.

F
EBRUARY 1973

Tutt’s getting married.

Inga from Germany. They say she never smiles. Just stares through your pupils, making you feel like cheap toy binoculars. She makes normal men nervous. Rockers happy. Knows all their doors and windows, how to pick locks, break in. Knows how to chat and laugh. Wears clothes so tight some say you can hear the ambition leaking through the fibers.

They also say her mother was Hitler’s private masochist, her exquisite skin his personal ashtray, the moody führer polka-dotting her with petulant tobacco scorches whenever the Reich hit a snag.

Inga is beautiful. She couldn’t have married anyone other than a star. And when she smiles at Tutt, his sky fills with puffy clouds, tweeting birds.

They all wanted Tutt. He wasn’t just an SRO pheromone. He was the one with the pretty face, sweet worry. The child without a mother who took your hand, smiled tentatively at any kindness. He was the poem only you could rhyme. The yearning vocal that stilled a stadium.

Made it weep.

Joke was he bled internally when he sang. But nobody could get over him. Even his ex-collaborator, Truce Wood.

“Know what he wanted to call our band, Petals?
Cry.
He always liked that name. Fit him, y’know? He’s a morose fuck. Real mood disorder.”

But what about the music?
I ask Wood. He keeps throwing his knife into a tree. This succulent-laden ranchette is what he bought with what he had left, a cacti-nippled nowhere.

“It’s sorta like this. Everybody else is writing songs. Tutt and Magurk hear God. Set it to music. Bleed for our sins.”

And we all get a chance to listen to the downpour. It’s a nice image. Or is it just that Truce is born again? He won’t answer, prefers not to talk about it.

Knife pulled from tree. A lost glance. After Petals broke up, Truce released some solo work. Band called Fat Couch. First album in ’70,
Happy Nap,
just sat in a dull puddle and died. Nothing clicked. Label cut them before a second album even made the climb into headphones.

Now he runs a bar, TRUCE, in Durango. He admits when everything in his world bent sideways, he lost his voice and dropped acid like it was vitamin C. Soon became so despondent and paranoid, he hired a private detective to track his voice down.

The guy charged him $250 a day, plus expenses. Told Truce he tracked the voice to a diner in Wichita Falls and cornered it but that it got away. He finally claimed to have found it and sent it by registered mail in a padded box to Truce. Truce still keeps the unopened box on his fireplace mantel.

“That’s what drugs’ll do to you.” He smiles. “I keep it there as a lesson to myself. I lost everything, man. I’m lucky I’m fucking alive.” He wipes the blade on his Levi’s. “Things change. And you gotta live with the ghosts.”

And now Rikki Tutt is marrying a hundred pounds of Mercedes austerity, and Truce is worrying about just the right wedding gift.

“Tell you this, females on seven continents are in mourning.”

He’s right. Rikki is more than the one who got away. He’s the only one who ever managed to find the way in.

“Maybe I’ll get him his own box for the mantel.” Truce is nodding, dead serious. “Fame swallows you when you ain’t looking.”

A
PRIL 1971

Twenty-two-year-old G. G. Wall, lead guitarist for Whatever, was named guitarist of the year by
Playboy
magazine in its annual music poll. He beat out Clapton, Segovia, Beck, Hendrix, Wes Montgomery, Joe Pass, Kenny Burrell, and George Harrison. His composition “Tight Squeeze” was also voted best instrumental of the year.

Wall, who quit school at fourteen, has suffered with emotional problems since childhood and spoke about it on a recent
Dick Cavett Show.
When asked about the place intellect plays in the music of Whatever, Wall replied to Cavett that his mind “doesn’t stop by much, anymore. Guess it had other plans.”

And about the psychotherapy he’s been in for more than ten years: “I believe in it. Psychology is like restoring paintings. Bringing back the original colors.”

Much of Wall’s teen years were spent in and out of juvenile facilities for burglary. He always broke into places of worship and is known to have stolen religious artifacts from literally hundreds of churches.

“Why should the churches keep it, man?”

And what has he done with all those artifacts?

“Well…” he manages, mischief clowning on his face. “Just say I couldn’t recall and replied with an opaque stare.”

S
EPTEMBER 1972

“Mr. President, let’s talk a bit about your private life with the First Lady. I understand you and Pat very much like to watch sports on TV.”

“The Soviet gymnast Olga Korbut is a remarkable athlete. I’m no fan of their government, but excellence can occur in surprising places.”

“I also have spies who tell me you have a passion for the music of Stan Kenton. Do you dance in the White House? The two of you? Alone?”

Nixon laughs. Takes a sip of water offered by Frost.

“I don’t think I’d better answer that without getting the go-ahead from Pat. She’s very private about romantic things.”

“Favorite movies this year?”

“We screen movies at the White House, as you know. Have some friends over. We very much liked
The Poseidon Adventure. Jeremiah Johnson. What’s Up, Doc?
I liked
Deliverance,
but Pat was uncomfortable with the violence.”

“And rock and roll?”

“Pat is a Helen Reddy fan. Roberta Flack’s ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ is quite lovely.”

“I’m talking about real rock and roll.”

He chuckles.

“Ask me another question.”

“Certainly you’re well aware of the Rolling Stones, the Beatles…”

“Of course. Very talented young men.”

“And Whatever?”

Nixon blinks. Sees it coming.

“Are you aware of how critical they’ve been of your foreign policy?”

“I haven’t heard that, no.”

“I can assure you, Mr. President, they seem to speak for their generation and mirror a huge dissatisfaction among the young people of America.”

“The people of Southeast Asia need our help.”

“Then what of other issues? One of the band’s number one songs, ‘World of Hurt,’ indicts what band members have been quoted as saying they perceive to be Washington’s apathy in regards to the dumping of toxic materials. Surely you’ve been told.”

Nixon grins darkly, jowls gathering; judgmental tuck and roll.

“Is that a question or a pointed object?”

“Why were members of the band beaten by police and arrested last month during a peace rally at the Washington Monument? You know about the arrests?”

“Are we discussing politics or rock music?”

“We’re discussing your waning popularity with the youth of the United States, sir.”

Nixon wipes his upper lip.

“They believe that your office is running an undeclared and immoral campaign of military violence in Southeast Asia—and that you wish to mitigate voices who are raised in opposition. That you are leading the young men of your country to slaughter.”

“You don’t burn the American flag. You do not. This band…they did that onstage.”

“And what of their outrage and despair…indeed, that of young people throughout your country?”

“You do not burn the flag.”

J
UNE
5,
1973

When Tutt first saw her, he says he saw the end.

It flashed like a precognitive REM warning, a half frame. A keyhole glimpse of a murdered form, slumped somewhere in his thoughts. A sense nothing good could come from being with her.

Tutt remembers her saying little. A smile that revealed something. Nothing. Everything he needed to believe. It was her gift; he realized it too late.

She was dark. Hair. Eyes. Jewelry. Her eyebrows were perfect on her beautiful face. She seemed strong; certain. Yet tears probably fell somewhere in her. Tutt felt it in a blink. A moment.

She smiled too easily, he remembers thinking. Wishes he’d paid more attention to the fleeting impression that soon blurred, raced away. He’d pay later for the oversight.

He was feeling at home in her eyes. Liked the heat of her skin, though he hadn’t touched it. But he sensed it was warm, like a solar beam that slips silently through shutters.

He could smell her perfume and thought for a moment it had always been his favorite scent, though he couldn’t place it. He could place nothing about her. But he knew her…at least, he says, he felt he must.

The astrologer he’d met at the recording studio during the first album mix had predicted the meeting with Inga. Told him he’d meet the woman he’d stay with forever. His soul mate. The companion who’d been imprinted in his flesh like the tiny colored threads that suffuse paper money.

Yet he knew nothing right could ever come from their life together. Even the day he married her, he was scared. Something was wrong. On that day, in that beautiful church above the glimmering sea, filled with friends and family, he felt sick. As they kissed, Rikki felt he was dying.

J
ULY 1972

“Look closely enough, everybody wants it.”

She’s nineteen. A lapsed Botticelli angel. Her own band, Crazy Tea Cup, tried it on Elektra but didn’t fly. Girls with guitars. Forget it. Gets on people’s nerves, like polka.

She watches guys; Kama Sutra no-nos fill her mind. There’s none of the cloying penance of her mother’s generation—shame over sexual abandon. The moral imprisonment of past generations of female sexuality is going up in flames, burned with all those bras outside the White House, a sky gone cotton and auburn outside Nixon’s front lawn.

And for Jamie, rock-and-roll cock is the best Ohio Blue Tip around.

“My mother’s generation were nice women with a lot of fucked-up frustrations.”

That pleasing curvature seeps from sheer blouse, tight bell-bottoms. Her skin is pearly, hands delicate.

“I’m just making up for lost time.” She rolls some Hawaiian and pouts for effect—a cannabis Lolita.

By her estimate, she’s meaningfully convened with more than a thousand rock luminaries. Just doing it for Mom. But for Jamie, Whatever takes the sweaty cake. She’s had them all and travels with the band whenever it hits the road. In fact, her territorial beekeeping of their privates’ lives and lives private consumes her at all times, and she often acts as nursemaid and confessional. She seems to feel her tonic closeness will ease their journey through life. Deepen their music. Make her part of it all.

“Magurk always says I’m quite up for the safari. ‘Warm clothes, a trenchant undertow to my casual asides. It’s all in the suitcase.’ He talks like that,” says this Radcliffe dropout who has traveled with Zep, Supertramp, Dr. Hook, and even Cat Stevens before, as she says: “…he boarded the ‘Preach Train.’ ”

She tried to move on from life on the road with Whatever, but the track marks of being that close to world level touring kept her on a backstage leash.

She tried it different. Even dated a cop, a bruised genie, who lived in a Smirnoff bottle after hours.

“Lasted a week. It was my mother’s idea. She thinks I’m attracted to guys like my father because he’s unavailable. Like if he were available, I’d fucking care.”

She drinks some ouzo. Licks those lips that take famous temperature in a special way. Would rather talk about Tutt and Magurk.

“They’re geniuses. Not the usual peacock clods.”

She giggles. “Definitely not pea cocks.”