The Armageddon Rag

  They were living together now, sharing a hotel room and a bed. Sandy wasn’t sure how that had happened. They had never discussed the subject of their relationship, really—it was more of a case of falling into it. Not that he minded. The more he got to know Ananda, the more she intrigued him.

  They seemed to spend an awful lot of time in bed. It wasn’t just sex, although the sex was an important part of it. ’Nanda was as sensuous and uninhibited as any woman he’d ever known. She had more than a touch of Maggie’s craziness; he was never quite sure what she’d think of next, but he found that he usually enjoyed it. Once, after a particularly wild night, he smiled down at her and said, “Any second now I’m going to wake up and discover that this is all a wet dream.”

  They talked a lot in bed, too. Once or twice they gabbed the night away, and Sandy staggered off to work yawning—yet somehow exhilarated. Ananda was a terrific listener. He told her about the breakup with Sharon, and the very telling made the hurt fade. With Ananda curled up in his arms, warm and smiling, losing Sharon seemed unimportant. They had never had that much in common anyway, Sandy was forced to admit.

  He told her about Maggie too, and about all the other women who’d come and gone in his life and his bed. He told her all his favorite anecdotes about Froggy, and she laughed with him. He told her about Slum and Butcher and she shared his rage. They spoke about his novels, and how much the writing meant to him. About the old days in the Movement and on the Hog. They talked about movies and comic books and politics and music. They almost always seemed to agree, and even when they didn’t, Sandy found none of the derision in Ananda that had been so much a part of his relationship with Sharon.

  “Why is it that I always seem to be the one doing the talking?” he said to her one night, after he’d been holding forth for some time. “What about you?”

  She sat up in bed, cross-legged and gorgeously naked, and grinning at him. “What about me?” she said.

  “Tell me about yourself. You know, where you grew up, your family, your old boyfriends, all the usual stuff.”

  “Uh-oh,” she said with mock alarm. “He wants to hear all about my checkered past. Where should I start? The brothel in Cairo? My years with the circus? You want to know why I flunked out of astronaut training?”

  Sandy hit her with a pillow. “Cut it out,” he groused. “Fess up!”

  “I was born at a very early age,” Ananda said with a straight face. “My parents are in the metal business. My mother irons and my father steals.”

  He slugged her again, growling, and she slipped to one side, grabbed a pillow of her own, and hit back. For a minute or two they whaled away at each other, cursing and laughing, and then Sandy lost his pillow and it turned into a wrestling match, and in no time at all to lovemaking. That was the end of conversation for that particular night.

  But Sandy persisted, and finally he did get Ananda to open up about her past. She was an Air Force brat, she told him. Her father was an NCO and a martinet; he’d disowned her about ten years ago and she hadn’t seen him since. An only child, she had grown up on a dozen different bases, at home and abroad; a troubled, lonely, friendless childhood that had left her with a deep, abiding hatred of all things military.

  Sandy had believed it all for about a week, until Ananda happened to mention her sister one night. “Sister?” he said. “What sister?”

  And it came out that none of it was true. Actually, she told him, she was the youngest of three. She did not like to talk about her family. She’d never known her father. Her mother said that he was a sailor, and that was about all she knew of him. She’d never gotten on with her two half-sisters. The oldest had become a working girl, like Ma. The youngest had gotten mixed up with a bad bunch in school, had gotten hooked on drugs, and had OD’d at seventeen.

  Sandy was properly sympathetic, but a little dubious this time. It was not the last story he got from her, by any means. Ananda was nothing if not inventive. She had been forced to drop out of high school, she told him once. No, not really—she’d gone to Berkeley on a scholarship and graduated with honors. Except, really, she’d been expelled for her part in the turmoil on campus. Her major had been in journalism. No, English. No, history. Or film. At least on Tuesdays. Her mother was dead. Her father was dead. They were both alive, a nice old couple living peacefully in San Diego. No, they’d moved to Africa ten years ago, where there was less stigma attached to interracial marriage. Ananda had figured it was more important to stay and fight. They’d been so poor she’d been forced to do a few porno films as a teenager. But she’d been a virgin until she met Edan. Edan had been her common-law husband once, but it broke up a long time ago. Edan and she had never been lovers. She’d never been arrested. She’d spent eighteen months in prison. As a kid, she’d been in and out of reform school a dozen times. She was the homeliest kid in her class. She was a high-school cheerleader. She was a high-school radical. Her real name was Sarah. Or maybe Cynthia. Or Jane.

  “You realize,” Sandy said to her at last, “that all this is more than a tad contradictory.”

  Ananda only smiled. “Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. I am large, right? I contain multitudes.”

  “You sure do,” he agreed. But by then it had begun to bother him. “Look, ’Nanda, I’m getting the feeling you don’t really trust me. I don’t like it. Why can’t you give it to me straight?”

  “I thought you liked women of mystery?” she said playfully.

  “Damn it!” Sandy snapped. “Cut it out!”

  That wiped the smile from her face. She crossed her arms over her breasts and regarded him soberly. “All right,” she said. “You want serious, I’ll be serious. You’re pressing me, Sandy, and I don’t like it.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe because I like you.”

  “That makes absolutely no sense.”

  “No? Well, it makes sense to me. I know what kind of life I’ve lived, even if you don’t. Some of it—well, let’s just say I’ve done a few things I’m not too wildly proud of. And a few others that I am proud of that you might not approve of. We haven’t known each other all that long, Sandy. I like you a lot, and I think you like me… but I’m nervous, too. Scared. Maybe if you really knew all about me, you wouldn’t like me so much. I’m afraid.”

  “I think you ought to give me a chance.”

  “Maybe I will,” Ananda said quietly. She reached out and took his hand. “But not now. Not so soon. There’s too much going on, and it’s all happening too fast. Gimme some time. Don’t force things. Let them grow.”

  “And what do we do in the meantime?” he said.

  Ananda grinned at him. “We go right on having a good time. Getting to know each other. Enjoying each other. Right?”

  “I guess,” he said, reluctantly. He didn’t like it. But neither did he want to press too hard and risk losing her. He didn’t think he could take that, after everything else.

  “Good,” she said. “Then it’s settled.”

  It was their only serious disagreement. Otherwise, they got on famously. Ananda was everything Sandy might have asked for; quick and intelligent, attractive, erotic, supportive, funny. She believed passionately in all the old, unfashionable ideals that Sandy had once believed in too. In her company, he found all those old beliefs coming back, as if he had never put them aside at all. With Ananda taking up so much of life and time and energy, it was almost possible for Sandy to forget his nightmares, forget Morse’s bloody hand and Jamie Lynch and the ominous echoes of Music to Wake the Dead. It all seemed a little silly now. Whatever strange dreams Morse might be dreaming, it was clear that the Nazgûl themselves knew nothing of them. They were only men, four musicians each struggling with his own problems, his own destiny.

  And struggle they did. “I don’t want to be here,” Gopher John told Sandy one night in the Bellevue-Stratford bar. “If it hadn’t been for that fire, I’d be gone. It’s not working. We oughta leave the memories alone. We used to be good. The best.
The fucking best. We’re going to shit it all up with this comeback.” His voice was bitter. “But what choice do I have? No fucking choice at all that I can see.” He glowered and finished the beer and called for another. Slozewski was drinking a lot of beer lately. Too much. Already his face was puffy under the heavy black beard that he was regrowing for the concert. And a small potbelly was pushing at his belt.

  Peter Faxon was not as open about his frustration, but Sandy knew that he was hurting as well. Tracy Faxon visited on three occasions during that period, and the last time she looked quite upset. “I’m worried for him,” she told Sandy privately just before she left to fly back to New Mexico. “He’s frightened about Chicago. Badly. He won’t let me attend, you know, me or the kids. He just says he doesn’t want us there. He says I ought to go to a movie that night, or take the kids up in the balloon, but he doesn’t want us in Chicago. He won’t even talk about it, and that’s not like Peter. I know what it means. He can’t say it out loud, but he thinks he’s going to fail, and fail badly, and he can’t stand the idea of me seeing it. Sandy, you seem like a decent enough guy. Watch him for me. Call me if things get rough. I don’t want anything to happen to him. Not again. He couldn’t take it again.”

  Even Rick Maggio did not seem happy with his dream come true. Chicago’s Civic Auditorium was a far cry from the Come On Inn, but Maggio had a frightened, desperate edge to him nonetheless, like a man trying to enjoy all the vice he possibly could today because he knew it was all going to be gone tomorrow. He felt up every woman in the sound crew and hangers-on, propositioned most of them, screwed about half, and gave the world long, rambling accounts of his sexual exploits on the morning after. Since he never seemed to bed the same woman twice, before long he was going further and further afield for his lays, and the girls were getting younger and younger. Sandy encountered him in a hotel corridor one night, with his arm around a black girl who couldn’t have been more than fourteen, and even Maggio had the grace to look briefly embarrassed before he forced a lascivious grin and asked Sandy if he wanted sloppy seconds.

  Maggio also talked about the stringent diet he was on, and to be sure he was losing weight dramatically. Only the “diet” was a fraud. What Maggio was dieting on was speed. He managed to keep it secret until the day that Faxon surprised him in the men’s room of the theater between sets, and Maggio spilled black beauties all over the tiled floor. The argument that ensued almost killed the Nazgûl reunion right then and there. Sandy was talking to Slozewski when they heard the yelling. They came running, along with a half-dozen others.

  Maggio was red-faced and screaming, on his knees, scrambling to pick up the pills as he shrieked epithets at Faxon. Faxon said nothing at all in reply; he just stood there in front of the urinals, looking down at his lead guitarist with a face like death. When Maggio had gotten all the black beauties, he got to his feet again and went on yelling. “You ain’t got no fucking right, man! Who the fuck you think you are? I don’t take orders from you, you hear, you hear, nobody tells me what the fuck to do, nobody, and especially not you!” He glared at Sandy and Slozewski and the rest of them. “Bug off, creeps,” he said. “This is between me and the fucking big shot here, the goddamned wimp big shot. It ain’t none of your fucking business, you hear? You’re all against me anyway, don’t think I don’t know it. I get all the pussy and you assholes are jealous, so fucking jealous you drool. You too, Faxon. Especially you. You been after me all along. You and your big house and your goddamned publishing rights, and you left me with shit. WITH SHIT! And the fucking Nazgûl wouldn’t have been nothin’ without me, nothin’, you hear?”

  “Rick…” Gopher John began tentatively.

  “Shut up, Polack,” Maggio snapped. “This is none of your business, man. You got that? You’re too fucking dumb to understand anyhow. So I take a few pills? What the fuck? I got it under control, man, you hear? I got it under control! It’s just for my weight, man, just to get my fucking weight down, I can’t go out there looking like this, you hear, you assholes, you hear? You’d like me to play like some goddamned hippo, right? That way you figure maybe you’d get some of that prime nooky, right? Well, forget it, assholes, it ain’t going to happen, I got it under control.” He looked at each of them in turn. “Fuck you,” he said. “Fuck you all.” Then he stomped out of the men’s room.

  “He really has it under control, doesn’t he?” Faxon said to the rest of them after Maggio had left. He turned to the urinal behind him, took his piss in silence, then zipped up calmly and walked out of the room and the theater. He didn’t come back for two days, and Sandy was left wondering whether it was over. Finally, on the third day, Faxon returned. “Gopher John needs the money and I need the music,” he told Sandy with a cold, still face. “It’s going to be a disaster, but I can’t live the rest of my life without making the attempt.”

  “And Maggio?” Sandy asked.

  “I don’t care,” Faxon said curtly. “He used to be my friend once, but that was a long time ago, and now I find that I just don’t give a fuck. If the band fails it won’t matter anyway, and if we make it, we’ll just get a replacement for Rick when he kills himself. That shouldn’t take long.”

  From then on, Maggio did his drugs openly, defiantly, taking a couple of black beauties before every session, a couple more afterward, and God knows how many when he was alone. The fat melted away, sure enough, and so did large hunks of his personality. He and Faxon scarcely spoke anymore, and relations between him and Slozewski also deteriorated steadily, until they almost came to blows over one of Maggio’s endless Polish jokes. Even Larry Richmond, deferential as he was, began to get pissed with the way Maggio treated him like dirt and ordered him around. “If only he was Hobbit,” Gopher John told Sandy after one bad afternoon, full of rancor and sniping. “Hobbit could always keep Rick in line… well, better’n anybody else could, anyway.”

  Sandy tried to avoid the rehearsals as much as he could. It was easy enough to do. Once the story of the Nazgûl reunion broke, his phones were constantly ringing with reporters wanting facts and interviews, old friends of the band wanting messages delivered, and parasites wanting free tickets. Besides, coordinating the local publicity in Chicago was a full-time job in and of itself. He had press kits to prepare, ads to place, a poster to design and print up, stories to feed to the local media.

  But work was not the real reason that kept him away. It was painful for him to hear the Nazgûl sounding so bad, and the atmosphere in the decaying Philadelphia theater seemed to grow more poisonous every time he dropped by.

  There were more and more people at the rehearsals, an army of strangers, many of whom made Sandy uncomfortable. The publicity that Sandy had planned had done its share, and Edan Morse had done the rest; together they produced an ever-swelling number of followers who wanted a piece of the Nazgûl. It was a very mixed crowd. There were groupies, of course, though not as many as Maggio would have liked, and not as pretty. Most of them were just groupies, a few still innocent and awestruck, a lot more looking faded and worn and badly used, one or two real burnouts with ravaged bodies and empty eyes. Yet there were some others…brusque and cold ones, too quiet, dangerous and somehow frightening.

  You saw the same strange mix all the way down the line. The head sound man was a short, square black man who had worked for the Nazgûl in the old days; he was good-humored and competent, as were his two assistants, though the rehearsals seemed to be doing a damn good job of grinding away his spirits. But Reynard (that was the only name he used), the light man, was brought in by Morse, and he struck Sandy as very strange; gaunt almost to the point of emaciation, his thin hair badly combed, his pants ragged and baggy, the pocket of his short-sleeved shirt always full of Flairs in a dozen different colors. Reynard was a whiz at lighting, but his manner seemed to swing between icy hostility and manic sarcasm. The road manager was a veteran hired for his experience, and he did his job well enough, but the roadies were like no other roadies Sandy had ever encountered. Th
ey were quiet, distant, humorless. They never got drunk, never got stoned. One of the women had snakes tattooed on both arms, curling around from wrist to shoulder. One of the men wore silvered sunglasses everywhere and carried a nunchaku. The rest of them could have blended right in at a Jaycees convention, they were so gratingly normal. But when Gort gave them an order—Gort had been put in charge of the roadies— they obeyed with an almost military precision. They gave Sandy a fluttery, cold feeling in the pit of his stomach, and he didn’t think he was alone in that. Even Maggio never hit on the female roadies, although a couple of them were quite attractive. Faxon called them the “orcs” and Sandy knew he was harking back to Tolkien, not to the long-defunct Nazgûl fan club.

  Ten days before Chicago, Sandy had a brief discussion with Ananda about the orcs. “They’re Edan’s people, aren’t they?” he asked her. “Alfies or worse? That’s why they seem so damned, I don’t know…disciplined, I guess.”

  She smiled. “So? I’m one of Edan’s people too, remember?”

  “Not like them. There’s something wrong with them, ’Nanda. I think they’re hearing things on the Jim Jones/Charlie Manson wavelength, if you know what I mean. I think they’d do anything Gort told them to do. Anything.”

  “They would.”

  “And that doesn’t bother you?”

  “They’re soldiers,” she told him. “When you’re in a war, you need soldiers. War changes people. You know what it did to the grunts in ’Nam. Fighting the war at home wasn’t any easier, right? Sometimes it was harder. Daddy was one of the enemies, and Mommy, and all your teachers and maybe even your playmates. They don’t trust you, Sandy. That’s why they’re cold. Give it time, right?”

  “This is a rock concert, not the Battle of the Bulge,” Sandy said to her. But he broke off the conversation then and there, feeling uncomfortable. It wasn’t his only moment of discomfort. More than once he woke up in the middle of the night in his room at the Bellevue-Stratford, feeling troubled by dreams he could not remember, wondering what the hell he was doing here, why he was involved in all of this. It would always be impossible to get back to sleep on those nights. Often he would dress quietly, in the dark to keep from waking Ananda, and go out to find an all-night coffee shop somewhere, where he could sit and stare down at the brown, muddy coffee and grope for a reflection there, hoping to see a bearded face he scarcely remembered, a face he had abandoned and changed a long time ago. All his ghosts would squeeze into the booth with him, and he would see them smiling at him across the formica, hear the clamor of their debate. Sandy would drink his coffee in silence and stare out the plate-glass windows at the darkness sighing through the city streets.