and sings.”
“I don’t care if you spin on your heads. Just keep the customers happy and thirsty.”
“Not to worry,” Bea said. “The moshpit will form on our very first song.”
“Slam dancing will make ‘em parched in a hurry,” I added.
“Who says ‘parched’ these days, Eddie? I mean really.”
Gustavo flung back a dark velvet curtain and showed us the stage. “The amps, mikes, everything is up there for you. Good luck and try not to break anything.”
With that I drug the kick drum up two steps and onto the wood platform that served as the stage. “Come on,” I called back to Bea.
Her head shook back and forth.
“Don’t tell me you’re backing out.”
“Not a chance. Just test the mikes and get set up. You can introduce me.”
I wasn’t sure if I saw anxiousness in those big eyes of hers or anticipation. Regardless, I rolled the kick drum across the stage and secured it in place. I did the same for the other drums and cymbals. When my percussion cave was complete, I flicked the mike near the drums and walked over and did the same for the one in front of the stage. They actually worked.
When I looked up I was surprised to see a rather large group (for us at least) of concertgoers mulling around the open floor below. In the back were expensive neon signs advertising cheap beer. There were no chairs to be found, which is good because at our last concert I had a folding chair thrown at me by one of the ladies at the Garden Nursing Home of Greater Florence. I really did.
I glanced over at Bea and was glad to see she was still in the wings. She gave me the peace sign and quickly turned it upside down to form an anarchy symbol. I smiled. She always makes me smile.
I took the mike in one hand and cleared my throat. “Hey all you thrashers, squelchers, mashers and moshers, I’m Edward T. Nad. Straight up. I play drums in this band and that makes me a thresher.”
Yells rose up from the audience.
“This here is—” I glanced over to the side to check on Bea. “This here is my girl, Beatrice. She rips vocals and plays mad guitar. That makes her a shredder.”
A smattering of applause arose as Bea made her way across the stage under the fresh-bruise lighting. I took my place behind the drums. Bea pulled her guitar over her shoulder so that it was in front of her. From behind I noticed that the strap fell just under her sunflower tattoo. It sat between her ripped shoulder blades. When she strummed her muscles would cause the sunflower to wave in an imaginary breeze that reminded me of a summer’s day.
Bea reached down and plugged the guitar into a chord lying on the floor. She gave the guitar a hard strum. “We’re Wroth!”
“Negative,” I said from behind.
Bea glared back at me, then slowly addressed the audience. “I mean, we’re Hallelujah and the Southern Gothic. We’re still hammering out the name of our bandd, actualllyy.”
Bea’s voice slurred and I could tell—even from behind—she was looking at someone or something right beside her. But there was no one there.
“I, uh . . . uh,” and for a moment it all went blank for Bea.
After the gig I learned that her father was standing right next to her, twisting a tuning peg on her guitar. He just couldn’t help himself. No one could see him, though, except Bea. Folco Portinari never missed one of her concerts. Truth be told, he attended more of them now that he was dead than alive. Folco had been a struggling musician for his entire adult life. He was always searching for that one hit that could propel him to stardom in Hitsville, USA. By the time he got his life together in the late seventies, he suddenly found himself playing roles as both father and mother when his flowerchild bride died while giving birth to Beatrice. Not in Maui General Hospital, mind you, but in the back of Folco’s rusted-out van with the bubble windows and floor covered in sleeping bags where Folco and Ryder used to spend many nights sleeping on the beach. “Ole Fisheye” they called the van.
And on that fateful day, that hippie-killing, responsibility-shaking day, he also inherited the job of naming Beatrice. A hundred times over Folco wished they had decided on a name for her prepartum instead of trying to be cool and wait to see how she looked in the first days and how the Inner Spirit led. So he picked the name Beatrice after having recently seen it in a tattered copy of The Divine Comedy he had been reading off-and-on while Ryder was in labor. He figured it was just as good as any other name used in the post-hippie, Hawaiian commune (Muddy Ponds, Rosebud Lane, and Justin Case) in which they lived on Maui.
You’ve got this, Bea.
I don’t know, Daddy. What if I suck?
Heck, you’ve got my 1970s Stratocaster around your neck with my Welcome to Hotel California sticker on the back. What could go wrong?
You know your little girl is always trying to please you. I learned Stairway to Heaven at the age of eight just to play it for you on your birthday. Remember?
And Folco Portinari was proud of her musical talents during those few moments when he was not buried under his notepads, sitting on the floor of the hut and barking chords to Bea who was strumming the Strat from a corner of the room. “Give me a C with a quick transition to D flat then crank on the whammy bar, Bea. No. No. I said C then D. There’s too much feedback on the amp. Try it now without the pick.” As Bea played Folco would feverishly write down chords for his latest rock anthem—chords that would never get heard apart from the commune bonfire on Saturday nights as palm trees swayed overhead.
Play, Bea. Now’s the time. It’s your time. You’ve got the chance I never had.
I can do this for you if no one else, not even Eddie.
Do it for yourself, Bea.
No. I’ll do it for you.
I saw Bea reached out into nothingness with an open hand that caressed an invisible cheek. Then she brought her hand back to the guitar. At that moment her posture straightened and she stared out into the audience. “Who cares what the name of our band is. Hades, we came here to rock and that’s what we’re going to do!”
The crowd roared.
“And remember, you’re not dancin’ unless you’re slammin’.”
With that the first chord reverberated into her wrist. Bea launched into a dark and brooding rock set.
“From Dust”
“Riven By Chance”
“Beautiful Rocker Boy”
“Asphodel Lowlands”
“Let’s (The La, La, Lee Song)”
“Collecting Angel Eyelashes”
“Among Graves”
Have to admit, Bea rocked something fierce. I love a woman in leather and boots and pigtails. She was amazing to watch from behind and I can only imagine how she looked from the front snarling at the audience. It was the fastest tempo she had ever called out for our songs and it took all I had to keep pace on the skins. She broke off into a guitar solo during “Among Graves” that lasted nearly fifteen minutes. I can best describe it as psychedelic-infused shredding with a tinge of auditory domination. The slam dancers were chaotic ocean waves pushing out into the middle of night before being sucked back to the edges of the crowd.
When we finished with the hour-plus set, the crowd was going nuts. During the clapping I joined Bea at the front of the stage and we bowed.
Bea flicked her guitar pick into the front row. I took her around the shoulders and we walked off stage. “We got a standing O, Bea!”
“You do realize there were no chairs in the audience, right? They had no choice.”
“Never thought of that. Thanks for ruining the moment.”
“Tell me you didn’t have a blast out there?”
“Alright. It was pretty much the coolest gig ever.”
We now stood on the other side of the velvet curtain that served as a doorway to the stage. One question was nagging me. “You saw your dad again, didn’t you.”
“Yeah,” Bea answered. Her eyes brightened in an uncommon way for a person who had just admitted to seeing a ghost. “Daddy’s still there for me and
I realize now that he always will be.”
Gustavo came running up from the wings of Hard’s Speakeasy. He was giving us the thumbs up. “Sweet! You got ‘em real thirsty. Had to change out three taps.” In one hand was a long strip of paper that must’ve been his drink sales for the evening. From his pocket he fished a money clip and paid us $100 cash. Bea saw the opportunity and booked us for a gig the following month. Gustavo was happy to oblige, though he didn’t care much for our “raucous music” but he realized “that’s what the young pups listen to these days.”
The gig, though, never happened.
It was all Bea’s fault, of course. It ended badly when we were standing in the alley behind Hard’s Speakeasy that night. I was surrounded by my drum set and Bea had her guitar strapped across her back. We had just played our last gig, although we didn’t know it at the time. Bea, hands on her hips. Me, cross-armed.
The fight was over the name of our band as usual. She thought we should be called Wroth, which is short for Wrath of Goth. “We can’t start building our artistic integrity until we agree on a name,” she said.
I shrugged and said we could do better. “Our artistic integrity, whatever is left of it, is all gunked up with crud like the end of a tube of toothpaste.”
“Exactly, but I wouldn’t compare it to a tube of toothpaste.”
“I’m serious, Bea. It’s gotten sticky anywhere you touch. The sink is full of grey spots that used to be our artistic integrity. Globs of them. They are clogging up the drain. Globs, globs, globs!”
“Why do you have to put